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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



Digitized by tine Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/greententinflandOOmort 



A GREEN TENT IN 
FLANDERS 



BY 
MAUD MORTIMEB 




Autour de la terre obsedSe 

Circule au fond des nuits, au coeurs des jours, 

Toujours 

L' or age amoncelS des idSes. 

— ^Vebhaeren 



ILLUSTRATED 

BY 
THE AUTHOR 



Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1917 






,^ 



< 



Copyright, 1917, hy 
DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & CoMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

, including the Scandinavian 



/ 



SEP 20 1917 



COPTRIGHT, 1916, BT THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPAKT 

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE RnW3WAY COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE CURTIS FUBUSHING COMPANY 



CI.A476163 



:> 



To 
A. T. 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 



Californian Gold 3 

Passe-paroles 18 

Toward the Front 31 

Arrival 42 

The Soldier's Funeral .... 49 

Taking a Look Round .... 56 

Details 60 

Shadow Pictures 68 

Ward I. The Telephone ... 75 

Shadow Pictures Again .... 78 

The Salle d'Attente .... 83 

The Civilian 89 

In the Wings 93 

The Carpenter 99 

Christmas 108 

The Name 115 

The Daily Round 120 

The Quill Driver 131 

How They Leave Us 139 

The Folk Song 142 

The " Light Breeze '* .... 146 

• • 

Vll 



viii CONTENTS 



PAGB 



Squalls . . . 154 

A Blow Below the Belt . . . 160 

Night Duty 164 

The Blue Face ^ . . . . . . 172 

Trying to Cut Knots .... 181 

The Eye • . .186 

Filling in the Background . . 192 

The Smile 196 

Flames 199 

Character . . . . . . . . 211 

A Dab at the Background . . . 215 

Angles of Vision 220 

Chums 227 

The Boot 233 

A Last Look 238 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 




WHATASTUFENDOUJ'CUflRENCVTQ-HAVC 



CALIFORNIAN GOLD 



December 3, 1915. 

At Pisa they began to come in — a young, 
nice-looking Italian clerk and an older man 
with one of those gracious manners that 
make travelling in Italy so much pleasanter 
than travelling elsewhere. 

We had hardly settled ourselves into three 
of the corners when a tall woman, her arms 
full of furs and pillows, came to the door. 
She eyed us carefully then, seeming satisfied 
that we would do, dropped her possessions 
into the empty corner by the door and dis- 
appeared, coming back a moment later with 
a valise, a hat box, and several large paper 

3 



4 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

bags to be stowed away above and below her 
with the help of the two men. 

The wu'e that had led to my corner seat 
had found me in Fiesole. It was from the 
Directress of a field hospital in France and 
offered me a temporary vacancy. I am no 
trained nurse and my V. A. D. official tag 
was too new to carry much self-confidence 
with it. I had therefore accepted the offer 
not without trepidation. It had been like a 
leap from a springboard into depths out of 
which, with the confused rush of many 
cautions and good wishes ringing in my ears, 
I had just emerged. 

Never was I more elated by the detach- 
ment and liberation that the beginning of a 
railway journey always brings me. Yester- 
day had been all personal scrimmage and 
disorder: to-morrow unaccustomed cords of 
emotion would perhaps twang. In Italy 
woolies, all white, for men struggling in the 
passes of their own Alps to hold the enemy, 
were daily being sent to the front, though as 
yet war had scarred little within sight of her 
civilian population. But how was I going 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 5 

to find the familiar face of France? Sixteen 
months before her side had been ripped 
open and blood from the wound was still 
trickling along her trenches. 

First would come Paris; then the hospital 
within sound of the guns. Deep in the 
cushions and alone with my thoughts I could 
let myself be as tired as I liked. Kind 
solicitude had remained behind waving 
handkerchiefs in Florence, its parting words 
in the knot of golden sweet-scented mimosa 
in my hand. Through misty windows, with- 
out any effort of my own, the curtain rose 
and fell on the Ligurian shore. Rearing 
blue waves flashed exultantly in the breath- 
ing spaces between sulphurous tunnels, and 
spidery bridges over riotous toy torrents 
alternated with the deep green of cypress 
and pine. All that was too good to last. 
Something was angling for my conscious- 
ness. A shadow of uneasiness was being cast 
upon me. Improvidently I glanced round. 

The Swede, for so she turned out to be, 
was sitting quietly in her corner, but she was 
evidently unquiet in her mind. Her eye 



6 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

roved restless and appraising from one of us 
to the other. Finding me perhaps the most 
accessible, since apparently I had no more to 
do or think about than she had, she opened 
fire. She was from Florence. She had 
lived there with her sister for many years. 
They owned a villa, pink and spacious with 
trees all around it, and a garden step- 
terraced with shaped pools of water. Surely 
I must know it — a landmark of the hillside .f^ 
And so on through a string of personal details. 

The spell of my journey was broken. At 
Genoa the pleasant middle-aged man got 
out, and Red Cross girls shook their collect- 
ing boxes in our faces. We moved on and 
the Swede began again. Then suddenly 
emboldened she reached her point : " Would 
you mind, madame, sitting on the other side 
and letting me lie down here.^ I am much of 
an invalid." 

I was so taken aback by the request that 
almost hypnotically I consented, though the 
other corner unpleasantly turned its back 
to the engine. Still, had she not the privilege 
of declared infirmity? 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 7 

She barely thanked me. With evident 
rehsh she carefully spread out her furs, 
arranged her pillows, reached up to the rack 
for her paper bags, and made a substantial 
meal. Then stretching herself out, her head 
in my desirable corner, she was soon in a 
sound sleep. 

The young clerk caught my eye and 
smiled. 

At the next station two more passengers 
got in and, naturally, sat on our side filling 
out our number, four. Presently a young 
girl looked in. The train was evidently full 
by that time. Seeing a little space at the 
feet of the sleeper, she began making herself 
thin enough to fit into it without waking our 
invalid. But life, alas, is not so simple. An 
irritable voice from the other end of the seat 
protested, "Mademoiselle, do you not see 
that I am trying to sleep? If you must come 
in here at all, sit on the other side." The 
young girl, apparently some one's little maid 
and accustomed to obey, got up, made a 
broken apology, and gently went out into 
the corridor where she stood with her back to 



8 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

us looking out into the night. A wave of in- 
dignation began to move in me, not allayed 
by the strong smell of sausage and other 
succulent viands coming from the paper bags 
imder my nose. So the next time the girl 
shyly glanced round at us I said, "That 
whole side does not belong to Madame. I 
am sure she will draw her feet up a little. 
You cannot stand all night." I was the 
more encouraged as I felt the sympathy 
of the compartment behind me. A voice 
in no way softened by physical weakness 
came from the Swede who, raising her- 
self on an elbow and glaring at me said, 
"Who put you there to police me? What is 
it to you if Mademoiselle stands all night?" 
As a shy person you have perhaps tasted 
the gratifying sense of enlargement when, in 
a quarrel not your own, after the first stam- 
mering words chokingly uttered, you sud- 
denly find yourself becoming eloquent. 
High words passed between us on the rights 
of individuals. Then she spread herself out 
again with her feet pushed well up against 
the girl who, in the heat of the fray and at a 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 9 

sign from the young clerk, had shpped into 
the vacant corner. 

I gaze musingly at her neutral back. How 
will it be where my camp hospital sits on 
that thin line between life and death ? There, 
at last, will the gyves of egotism be for a 
moment loosened? 

Toward midnight we slowed down at the 
frontier, and went through the farce of show- 
ing passports and being matched with 
sketchy snapshots in which an eager lover 
could hardly trace a likeness. A custom- 
house official, putting his head into each 
carriage, repeated the question, "Has any 
one here any gold?" Now in an under 
pocket I had three double-eagles, such as in 
California we used caressingly to call Golden 
Cartwheels, and four ten-dollar gold pieces — 
a last thought of my husband's as I left the 
land where "Toncle de la Calif ornie" rolls 
round on such wheels. "One never knows 
what may happen. You had better keep 
these against an emergency — and for luck," 
he had said. And I had kept them now ten 
long months, until they had moved for me 



10 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

out of the zone of possible currency and be- 
come, like so many of one's possessions, 
merely sentimental and superstitious treas- 
ures. 

"Has any one here any gold?" 

Certainly they are gold and my world is at 
war. " Ecco, signore," and I placed the little 
purse in his hand. 

He opened it and spread the coins out 
wonderingly to the curiosity and delight not 
only of my own compartment but of the 
small crowd in the corridor who, hearing 
words pass between a passenger and a cus- 
toms official, meant to lose nothing of the 
excitement of a possible fray. Even my 
Swede roused herself and eyed us hungrily. 
Was I, arch-enemy of her rest, to be dis- 
credited and she to be reinstated in public 
opinion as having been the first to guess at 
my inherent perfidy .f^ 

*' Very well, signora, I shall be here again 
in a few minutes." The customs officer 
gave me back my gold and passed on. He 
was away so long that I, feeling somewhat 
self-conscious in my unaccustomed noto- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 11 

riety, slipped out into the corridor to look 
along the platform and anticipate, if possible, 
the next move in the game. Just be- 
hind the door I stumbled against a tall, 
handsome carabiniere standing there quietly 
with his arms folded. 

"Do you know how long we stop here?" 

"Until all the luggage has been passed. 
There is a good deal to-night." 

"I am waiting for the officer." And I 
told him my tale. 

He smiled indulgently. "Signora, I am 
ut here to mount guard over you." 

"Oh," I said, amused, "it is too bad, after 
all, that I must give up my gold. It is a 
keepsake." 

Now no one, as you know, can make an emo- 
tional appeal of any sort to an Italian with- 
out being met half-way. He looked steadily 
at me for a moment and then — in fluent 
American — ' ' Why did you declare it ? It was 
quite safe in your under pocket. If it was 
given you for luck I should put it back there." 

"But the customs officer has seen it.". 

"Then put half of it back and only give up 



n A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

half. If you mix the coins, large and small, 

he will never remember." 

"How on earth do you talk my language 

so well?" 

"I am just back from California for the 

war. I have been in business there for two 

years. 

Have you hidden 
half, signora, for 
we must be going 
to the office." 

"No. Cosa 
fatta, capo ha. 
Let us see it 
through." 

The crowd on 
the platform was 
thinning, each 
passenger anxious 
to get back to his 
disturbed slum- 
bers. Our mo- 
ment had come, 

my carabiniere's and mine. We marched 

in state the length vof the train and into 




A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 13 

an office opposite the last compartment, 
where three men with as much of an official 
air as an Italian can ever put on — the merely 
human is so near the surface in them all — sat 
at a desk. One or two passengers who evi- 
dently had been having financial transac- 
tions with them were moving away. 

One of the officials looked up inquiringly. 
I repeated my tale for the third time and, 
having tasted the potency of the emotional 
appeal, added that I should be happy to 
keep my gold, since it was not of the cur- 
rency of the belligerent countries and be- 
sides, a keepsake. 

Looking at me rather amused and as- 
tonished, he said very kindly and much to 
my amazement : "If you had wished to keep 
it, gentilissima signora, you should not 
have declared it. How many lire is it 
worth?" 

"I have not the faintest idea." 

"What lovely money! Look, Edoardo! 
Calif ornian, you say? " And he spread it on 
the table. Then, looking around at his 
companions: "Does any one know how 



14 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

much it is worth ? ' ' And, wistfully : ' ' What 
a stupendous currency to have!" 

"About a hundred lire each, the big ones; 
fifty lire the smaller ones," piped up my 
jailor. 

''About! That is all very well. And be- 
sides, what is the present exchange? The 
whole question is there. Does no one 
know.^" 

The little office was almost dark and the 
train gave me a blank, uneasy sense of readi- 
ness to be off. Why had they left me till the 
last? It flashed across me, I confess it to my 
shame, that they were simply fooling to gain 
time and that the next suggestion would be 
confiscation until I should come back that 
way, or until they could discover the exact 
value. 

"Could you not let it pass, signori?" I 
ventured. "It is not a large sum and will 
hardly help the exchequer. You see how 
pretty it is. I hate to part with it." 

"Give me that book, Edoardo." And a 
fat volume was handed to him. A long 
finger moved searchingly down several 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 15 

tightly printed columns. **C-a. . . . C-a-I 
. . . Californian gold is not mentioned 
here. That other volume, please." Again 
the long finger felt its way attentively along 
the pages. ''Neither is it here. Pardon, 
madama, we have just one more book on 
rarer coins. If we cannot find it there 
. . . Quickly, Luigi, the train is going. 
Get me that fat red book from my desk in 
the other room." 

This time the three heads were close to- 
gether and three pairs of eyes eagerly 
scanned the words. *' It is useless. What's 
to be done? Californian gold is mentioned 
nowhere. Thank you, signora. We cannot 
cheat you by guessing at the value neither 
can we cheat ourselves. It is with pleasure 
we may allow you to keep your beautiful 
foreign gold; we know it is always pain to 
part with a gift." And, with a courtly bow, 
"Luigi, take the signora back to her com- 
partment and see that she has no trouble 
with her luggage." 

There was no time to be lost. We flew 
into the baggage room. The magic chalk 



(6 



16 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

mark was put on my trunk and I made a 
dash for the train. 

^'Partenza, partenza,'' shouted the guard. 
As I put my foot on to the step I pressed a 
coin into Luigi's hand. 

Impossible, signora, I cannot take it." 
As a keepsake," I smiled back. 
Ah, in that case, mille grazie e huon 
viaggio.'' And with a grin, " Lucky they had 
never been to California." 

I tumbled into my place only just in time. 
The train was moving out of the station. It 
was only as Luigi's face disappeared that the 
import of his words flashed over me. How 
should they know at Chiasso that the Stars 
and Stripes floats even beyond the Rockies? 

"Well.?^" 

" I keep my gold," I answered. " Give me 
Italy for courtesy." 

The young clerk looked pleased, but from 
the other side came a savage growl, "So like 
a woman, smiling and polite where men are 
concerned — butter won't melt in their 
mouths — but insolent to women, how in- 
solent, you all saw, to me." 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 17 

A flush of anger rushed to my cheeks. 
Happily just in time I caught the sympa- 
thetic eye of the little maid and laughed. So 
did she, so did the young clerk, so did the 
other two. The Swede had lost the game. 
She stretched herself out her full length, 
tucked herself well in, used the little maid as 
efligies on tombs use little dogs, as a last 
cosy comfort in the draughty vastness of an 
alien waste, and angrily muttered herself to 
sleep. But as we all straightened aching 
backs, did we not owe her sleep at least for 
the flattering unction of our own self- 
righteousness.^ During the night she took 
her revenge — diving into her crackly paper 
bags and before each refreshment pulling up 
the shade and letting the light blaze into our 
faces. 



PASSE-PAROLES 

December 5. 

Paris at last. The long, cramped night is 
over. A cup of the rarely good coffee of the 
Gare de Lyon restaurant restores my spirits. 
There are no porters. I leave my things 
under the eye of a customs official, all now 
and forever my friends, and run down the 
station slope for a cab. The first cabman on 
the stand annexes me. He is old — all men 
in Paris now are old — magenta-faced, bul- 
bous-nosed, a replica of Ghirlandaio's "Old 
Man with a Little Boy" of the Louvre, 
though without his look of tender solicitude. 
No little boy am I. 

The horse, our horse, for there is no 
escape, is of the same string as Rosinante. 
He draws the most ramshackle cab I have 
ever been in, and mine is a long, varied ex- 
perience — one of those cabs that in the ab- 

18 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 19 

sence of fares serves its owner as sleeping 
quarters. I get in. My bulbous-nosed one's 
blue coat is still rolled up suggestively in one 
of the corners. 

We drive back for my traps, then move off 
at a snail's pace. But all things end, and we, 
too, reach the flat kindly lent to me by a friend . 
It is on the fifth story, a pretty little perch, 
looking over the deserted gardens of the 
Austrian Embassy, and decorated with war 
trophies. On the mantel, empty shell cases 
and hand grenades; down on the hearth, 
lumps of shrapnel; on the walls, framed. 
Von Bulow's proclamation to the men of 
Liege, inked so heavily and picturesquely as 
to be decorative were it not for the sinister 
menace of its words. Opposite it hangs an- 
other heavily inked proclamation, also from 
the German military headquarters, to the 
people of Charleroi. 

This is one of the many dark moments for 
the Allies. The English and French in 
Serbia are in full retreat. Greece is doing 
more than fight against us. Germany seems 
to have made just the political splash she 



20 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

needed and, when that job in the Balkans 
is wiped up, for Rumania hangs in the bal- 
ance, can she not roll her forces again to 
the western front and reach even Paris? 
The papers are pessimistic and, for the first 
time, as I sit among the trophies, I begin to 
feel in more than a leading-article contact 
with the throb of events. 

My eye travels round the curious salon 
ornaments, from a bit of bell from Rheims 
Cathedral to other sharply jagged frag- 
ments of metal so heavy for their size. Even 
safely tucked away in this little room one's 
imagination stirs and shudders. How un- 
related those sharp edges are to the almost 
amoeba-like softness of human flesh. Under 
what magic do shrinking nerves on all fronts, 
moving in masses, or as single men, defy 
them again and again in their bleak nega- 
tion of familiar human values. They make 
me wonder how bravely the soldier's 
vaunted lack of imagination plays him 
fair in the teeth of such brutalizing 
lumps, especially when the menace is 
not at the door of his own home, nor 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 21 

the goad of a devastated hearth under his 
eyes. 

Paris is spotted with crape. Mannequins 
in the show-windows of the Grands Ma- 
gazins de Nouveautes offer with equal art, 
on one side, bright new uniforms, alluringly 
decked out with stripes and made to fit 
dapper young bodies, smart kepis and trim 
kits; on the other, all grades of feminine 
mourning — the coquettishly becoming and 
still aspiring taking the lead, the blank, 
crushed, plain, cheap black heedless of form 
or wile bringing up the rear. 

In an inner courtyard of the Invalides 
guns and fragments of guns of all kinds, 
bones of Zeppelins, and motorless corpses of 
various aircraft, are on show. Absorbed 
and circling round and round are poilus at 
home on leave. Most of the spectators, 
curiously enough, are poilus. One would 
have thought they had had their fill else- 
where. Perhaps the blind, burrowing ac- 
complishment of modern warfare reserves 
for home a convincing sight of the enemy. 

In the Petit Palais, for a franc, we can 



22 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



wander past the glories of the tapestries of 
Rheims and other reUcs now doubly precious 
as we find them ours again after their hair- 
breadth escape from plundering hands. 




The sunshine gleams on the gilding of this 
our entrenched camp, but we play no new- 
sought answering facets. We are irrespon- 
sive, self-centred, silent. There are no 
clanking motor busses, hardly any trams. 
At all subway stations large, sombre, funnel- 
shaped crowds are greedily sucked in, or 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 28 

shot out fanlike and scurry away. Taxis 
carry the more fortunate. The streets are 
dark at night, except where blue shadows 
over rare lamps throw wan circles of light on 
to the pavements. Ostentatious joy and its 
votaries make their profits elsewhere. For 
once Paris is at home and alone. 

I change my Italian money at a bank and 
am given only sixteen francs for every 
twenty lire — the backlash of all the fat 
profits made on American money changed in 
Italy. I even, in answer to an appeal, dis- 
gorge my showy *^ Calif ornian " coins, drop- 
ping them into the Banque de France and 
thus earn, all too easily, as gilding of the 
dull-looking exchange, a souvenir certificate 
for patriotic devotion to the Republique. 

Then follow days of demarches. The 
permis de sejour, given up three months 
earlier on my way to Italy, has not been sent 
back from the frontier. After much speech 
I am allowed to remain until inquiries can be 
made — happily long enough for my present 
need. But there must also be a permis de 
depart and small rope-puUings of all sorts — 



24 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

to the Embassy for a letter, to the Invahdes, 
to the Prefecture, which last has at least the 
advantage of being near Notre Dame into 
which I steal trying to make more vivid 
to myself the tragedy of Rheims than by the 
repetition of forcible adjectives that now 
slip so f acilely from our tongues. A depress- 
ing verdict from the inner office of my tem- 
porary Commissariat de Police, that by no 
means shall I with "born in Budapest" 
written on my passport ever be admitted to 
the war zone, damps my spirits. What, not 
even with a special order from the D. E. S. 
and all my papers in order? "Try it, 
madame, but you might as well give it up at 
once and save yourself trouble." At last in 
despair I go to Headquarters and all diffi- 
culties vanish. Always go to Headquarters. 
That is quite a tip to remember whenever 
you are most harassed by the creative genius 
for obstruction of lesser bureaucratic ways. 
Yet they are only too right to be careful. 
How often have I not looked on critically 
and found them over-lenient in presence of 
certain suspicious earmarks — ^hints for in- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 25 

stance of Teutonic birth unconsciously 
flaunted by furtive pairs of boots. In 
peace times I have sometimes played a game 
with myself, guessing in trains and subways 
at my neighbours' nationality by their boots 
and war has sharpened the scent. But one 
does not like to be practised on oneself, be- 
cause one's mother happened to be in 
Hungary on a particular day in September. 

December 11 

This afternoon, when I got home, an 
official-looking document begs me to call 
again at my Commissariat de Police "on an 
important matter." I search my conscience 
for a possible crime and hurry off at once to 
put an end to suspense. Has something 
cropped up which may at the eleventh hour 
bar me from the war zone? In making up 
my dossier they have found my genealogy 
faulty. Will I be good enough to give them 

the names of my maternal grandparents 

For all the demarches, the shopping, the 
rush, how quickly the slowest wheel re- 
volves. We wait and wait. Suddenly the 



26 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

moment is here, it is past; the ground has 
crumbled behind our heels into unfathom- 
able depths and, for all it concerns us, 
yesterday is comparing notes with the 
yesterdays of Napoleon. 

Moving On 

December 12. 

I am up at six, dress by candle light, 
snatch a stale roll and a cup of tea which 
play in and out of the last packings and the 
strapping-up of my holdall, and listen for a 
step on the stairs. " Ca creuse^' an old model 
I once knew used to exclaim after such a 
meal. There is no sound. I lug the holdall 
down five flights. Is the concierge awake.^^ 
The taxi is not there. "What would you.^^ 
This is war," he shrugs sleepily. We are 
far from tram or underground. Something 
must be done. " Get me anything you can 
find and quickly, please." 

The wait in the biting, half -misty morning 
air seems interminable, until my messenger 
drives up with another of those sluggish 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 27 

one-horse cabs. They seem to be enjoying 
their own St. Martin's summer on the rive 
gauche just now. 

*'Can we make it in time.f^" 

"I think so." 

"Hurry up, cabby; to the Gare de TEst." 

We are breaking into a trot when a violent 
jerk at the reins stops us. I crane my 
head out of the window and see a friend 
doubhng after us. She has come to see 
the last of me. She jumps in and we are 
finally off. 

Both of us are up earlier than usual and 
both flurried. We begin to discuss, of all 
soothing subjects, the final good of war. 
She is just back from the front and from the 
hopelessness of patching people up only to 
be killed or further mutilated when they 
don't want to be either — ^people, she has 
it, who are mostly filthy, sordid, grotesque, 
smell bad, and have personally neither inter- 
est in the cause nor detachment enough for 
heroic action. 

"Heroism in war is nothing but a reflec- 
tion from above — imitation or coercion — ^not 



28 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

skin-deep and therefore of no value to the 
individual." 

Can mere gregarious living escape that 
indictment, I wonder, to say nothing of 
religions, governments, organizations. If 
too much cannot be said against war and its 
brutal robbing of Peter to pay Paul, what 
may not be said of our peace-time smug 
indifference to the loathsome diseases of 
labour, to the callous slaughter of our 
streets, to the filth of innumerable occupa- 
tions imposed by our greed .^^ Such useless 
dead waste of life is not less blunting, though 
it takes longer, our vision is less focussed, 
and a diagnosis more baffling. Perhaps 
the inexorableness of the war test forces a 
self -revelation upon us such as generations 
of easy-going prosperity could never drive 
through the hide of our unconsciousness. 
Shameless self-interest and cowardly be- 
trayal of the weak lie naked under the white 
light. Is it not mere stage-fright to specu- 
late now whether the loss and agony of a 
generation is too high a price to pay for an 
eye washed clear .^ We should have thought 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 29 

of that before sending others to fight for us. 
It is too late for the many words, for the 
philosophies of peace. Heroism enough has 
been liberated to be contagious. We are 
mortgaged to those who have fallen for our 
awakening. We may no longer, by con- 
fusing the issues, fail them — nor may we 
forget. 

The station is dark. Crowds of soldiers 
with their mothers, sweethearts, wives, and 
children, stand about in little groups looking 
into one another's eyes, or clinging lip on 
lip. Here and there is the bluff of gaiety 
and perhaps something of the lightness of 
leaving monotony for adventure — the daily 
round for the untried, the unmeasured — as 
they wait to entrain for the front 

Are these the men I shall meet again when 
their journey and mine are over.^^ I scruti- 
nize them for the first time, and the lumps of 
shrapnel, the bullets, the hand grenades 
flash through my mind. I look at the 
women. They will not be there, but I shall 
see them as they stand ghostlike behind 
each of those distant beds. Who was it 



so A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

that wasted time in argument about a final 
good of war? 

I have carefully provided myself with a 
ticket for which yesterday I made a special 
journey across Paris. At every ticket ofiice 
interminable strings of people wait. My 
ticket must be stamped at the moment of 
leaving. I join the most likely-looking 
queue only to find when my turn comes that, 
"you must go to No. 9 and pay a tax of 
twenty centimes." 

At No. 9 another long line is patiently 
standing. But we are the train; it waits for 
us. At last we are off. ^^ Malbrough s'en 
va-t-en guerre," 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

A Belgian N.-C. officer — ^his khaki uni- 
form so like that of Kitchener's immortal 
Mob — and a pretty woman are opposite to 
me. I stoop to get something out of my 
hand-bag. A shapely, white-topped boot is 
furtively placed on his, and through my hat 
brim I see their lips stealthily come together. 
Misplaced objects in hand-bags take some 
time to find. The compartment is not 
heated; warm lips under the circumstances 
must taste rather good. 

A hoar frost veils all colour; the pale winter 
sunshine has given up the struggle to reach 
us, and the day is settling down to its por- 
tion of blank gray mistiness out of which 
bare tree shapes and telegraph poles quiver 
a moment coldly colourless and are gone. A 
few shadowy women are working in the 
fields, and from time to time a gun with its 
horizon-blue servants bobs up and disappears. 

31 



32 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

At Amiens a train has emptied on to the 
platform its load of men fresh from the 
trenches. They seem a jumble of regiments 
and are spattered with mud from head to 
foot. Some look very ill, all are deeply lined 
as from great strain and fatigue. We look 
away from their eyes, shrinking from what 
must be photographed there. One is bare- 
footed on the cold flags; his dirty, blue, swol- 
len feet give me a shooting, sympathetic 
shudder. Did he leave his boots in some 
sudden alerte, or was it only that they would 
no longer go on to such swollen feet ? Around 
this driftwood of war is certainly no trace of 
the glamour of a Meissonier or the fan- 
faronnade of a Detaille. These seared, grimy 
men are in every variety of costume — 
scarves round their heads in place of lost 
caps; sky-blue, knitted helmets, made by 
kindly romantic fingers; torn coats and 
sweaters — and their hands are deformed by 
chilblains. They are dishevelled, abject, 
promiscuously huddled together; yet un- 
broken, as they good-humouredly smile at 
one another's little jokes and wait for a 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 33 

tardy train to take them for a time to rest 
and safety. 

An intricate, frosted arrow-pattern dims 
our windows, then spitting rain. The mist 
is dispersed and we begin to see an endless 
sky-Une broken only at one point by an 
ugly new windmill, its colour washed bright 
against the thick gray sky. 

A woman on my left with coronet and 
monogram on her luggage says a few words 
to me. She has been home on leave and is 
going back to her hospital at Calais very 
reluctantly. 

*'One cannot stand it for long." 

Her *'it" dismays me. How soon shall I 
flatten my nose on the hoardings of my own 
endurance.'^ War makes one conscious of a 
tremor of excitement tingeing the undertone 
of our quietest moments — sl perennial secret 
hope somewhere, somehow not to fail one- 
self, or no more, perhaps, than the fascina- 
tion of possible danger about which we have 
been told so much. 

Everywhere is a sense of loneliness and 
emptiness. A solitary crow glides on the 



34 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

wing diagonally, raises both wings and 
alights, feet foremost, on the ploughed field, 
lil^e a gull on water. It alternately rains 
and sleets. I feel restless and oppressed 
and go out into the corridor to shake it off. 
A nice young Canadian in khaki comes up 
to me and we stand together looking out. 
He is attached to one of the hospitals and 
talks to me of his friends and of some of the 
lively moments in their work. 

The Plight 

A telephone call for a car came from a 
certain dressing station. Edward Frost, a 
Canadian ambulance boy, was told off to 
answer it. When he arrived, five men — 
sappers — were huddled into his ambulance 
and another — a sixth — was slipped into the 
vacant seat at his side. The enemy had 
countersapped them and the explosion, 
though it did not reach them had blocked 
up the mouth of the tunnel in which they 
were working. They had been buried, and 
without food or drink, for four days before 
they were found and rescued. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 35 

Between the dressing station and the 
hospital, to which he was told to take them, 
was a stretch of road during the last few 
days constantly under shell fire. He started 
with his load and without lights, feeling his 
way through the night by dimly recognized 
outlines of trees, bends in the road, and all- 
too-familiar ruts and holes. 

Past a small bridge they began to climb 
gently rising ground. There was a whang! 
and a shell whistled over their heads. 

Frost threw in the high-gear. He listened 
uneasily. What was the engine up to? The 
men inside the ambulance were unusually 
noisy and our driver's sharpened senses be- 
became conscious that their speech was 
strangely broken. One voice seemed to be 
softly chanting words rhythmically repeated. 
Frost strained his ear to catch them as they 
droned on, the last syllable swallowing the 
first in a monotonously linked cycle of sound. 

" Generals-captains, colonels-captains, em- 
perors-captains, sapeurs-sapeurs ! Colonels- 
majors, sergeants-majors, emperors-majors, 
sapeurs-sapeurs ! 



36 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

" Adjutants-sergeants " 



"Sssh," hissed a voice; ''you'll wake my 
wife and her Sunday will be spoiled!" 

This was interrupted by a peal of derisive 
laughter and hands banged on the ambu- 
lance behind his head. Suddenly Frost 
caught his breath. There it was again — 
yes, this time unmistakably — an ominous 
little tapping, hammer-like tapping of the 
motor. It was almost madness to go on. 
Yet once at the top and a mile farther on 
there would be comparative safety for re- 
pairs. It was a toss-up. He would take 
the risk. 

" Generals - captains, colonels - captains, 
emperors-captains," began to throb in his 
blood as they flew along. The man be- 
side him was acting very queerly. Frost 
glanced furtively at him. There was ter- 
ror in his face and his eyes were fixed on 
the sky. Suddenly he ducked and threw 
an arm protectingly over his head, re- 
mained crouching for a few moments, a 
humped-up, panting heap; then straight- 
ened himself out, peering into the distance. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 37 

paused a moment, and repeated the whole 
cringing straightening-out movement again 
and again. If he would only speak! But 
no word from him broke their silence. 
Between horror that the man would lose 
his balance and fall out, and anxiety to 
get them all into safety. Frost kept the 
corner of a fascinated eye on the strange 
gymnastics at his side while he picked his 
way along the treacherous road. 

HaK-way up the slope, thud, thud, thud — 
and the motor stalled. There was a yell 
from inside: '' Sacredieu ! he stops!" The 
fan-belt had slipped. Frost climbed down 
and looked round apprehensively. The cur- 
tain-doors of the ambulance were bulging. 
Then a hand pushed through and unhooked 
them and five men scrambled out. All were 
naked. In the clear dark night they seemed 
to his superconsciousness the conspicuous 
centre of a deep purple glass ball. The 
neutral stars winked coldly safe in their 
immense dome. Another shell whistled 
past not ten yards from where they stood. 
Frost felt for a moment like a pitiful mimick- 



38 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 




NCUTRAU STARS WINKED COLCvyc 



ing reflection of his cowering companion. 
Whose teeth were chattering, the panto- 
mime actor's or his own? Together their 
eyes swept the shadowless waste. There 
was no cover anywhere. He was alone on 
that road with six madmen. 

Opening the tool-box he fumbled for his 
monkey-wrench . . . 

At Staples my friendly Canadian gets 
down. We pass a prison camp and I catch 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 39 

sight of a man holding his hands up over his 
head, and of a big chap in kilts doubling 
back and forth. What can Staples, which 
has meant so much to me in the past with its 
beautiful absinthe swamps and its hysteric, 
overflowing river, ever mean to me again 
but two arms that will never be lowered and 
a big man in kilts forever running out his 
punishment against blotchy gray-and-green 
sand dunes? 

How desolate the under-canvas hospitals 
must be now. The canvas sags and strains 
and water drips from its edges. 

Calais is crowded with troops. It is 
nearly dark when we arrive and are asked 
to show our papers. We are told they are all 
right. Then just as we are taking our 
places in the Dunkirk train, another oflBcial 
looks us over and sends us off to form part of 
a long waiting line for a vise to our laissez- 
passers. When at last our turn comes our 
laissez-passers after all need no further vises. 
But by that time it is growing late. The 
lady with the coronet and I find ourselves 
stranded. We have only time to snatch a 



40 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

sandwich and a stick of chocolate — my first 
food since that unsatisfying breakfast (was 
it no longer ago than this morning?) — and 
hurry to take our places in one of those 
small, old-fashioned carriages with coach- 
like windows. Most of its inmates are 
oflScers, who vie with one another in the 
vivid details they give of their holiday or 
their work. No one seems anxious to be 
back on that shadowy front. One officer, 
thinking the gossip is taking an unpatriotic 
turn before strangers, talks the others down. 

At Dunkirk I am literally pounced on by 
two stern officials and again ordered to show 
my papers. Not a flaw this time. The 
officials are all politeness. In a few mo- 
ments I am driving through the now-almost- 
deserted streets of the town to the "Cha- 
peau Rouge" — a big bare hbtel de province 
with a deep porte-cochere and a courtyard, 
bare wooden floors, and low-stepped, wide 
wooden staircases. 

I am numb with cold and fatigue. The 
red carpet in my room, the running hot 
water, the pleasant dinner at a little table 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 41 

by myself, soon thaw me. There is only 
one other woman in the room, also at a little 
table alone. She is tall and fine-looking. 
All the other tables are crowded with mili- 
tary and naval men in uniforms of all colours. 
Some of them pause as they pass to say a 
word to the distinguished woman. I dis- 
cover later that she superintends the buffet 
at the station for the evacues as they pass 
through on their way from camp to base 
hospitals. 

So this is the war zone. A couple of 
days ago bombs were dropped on the town. 
I fall asleep in a little flutter of anticipation. 



ARRIVAL 

December 13. 

The curator of an English museum, mobil- 
ized as a chauffeur, a man over forty, 
bronzed and kindly, comes from the hospital 
to fetch me. 

I am taken first to introduce myself to 
the Colonel and be given a safe-conduct. I 
find myself in an outer office with bare 
wooden floors, a map of the war zone, and 
the already familiar: ^' Taisez-vous, mejiez- 
vouSy les oreilles ennemies vous ecoutenV* on 
the walls. Two or three military men write 
at tables. 

"The Colonel will receive you." 
The inner office communicates no sense of 
hurry or importance, yet all the responsi- 
bility for the movement of troops, the com- 
missariat, the great business of passports 
and pass-papers of all sorts — and how enu- 

4A 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 43 

merate the rest? — for this whole region move 
through it and under the eye of the quiet, 
kindly, middle-aged man who sits at a large 
table in the centre of the room. His 
pleasant voice and quiet dignity, the orders 
given to his secretary about some pressing 
matter and about my papers, put me im- 
mediately at my ease, and the limpid sim- 
plicity of his French gives me the reassuring 
illusion of being there, too, within my depth. 

Apparently the true French gentleman 
at least, capable and disinterestedly helpful 
— fruit of generations of self-restraint and 
intellectual flexibility — comes undistorted 
even through a military uniform with its 
self-assertive buttons. 

The new pass-paper that he hands me 
gives me the right to a single ride, and only 
on the hospital ambulance now standing 
at the door of the D. E. S. There is evi- 
dently to be no individual vagrancy here. 
Inside the ambulance are an English nurse 
and the wife of a soldier who died yesterday. 
She has come to town to buy her mourning 
and a bead wreath for the funeral. I take 



44 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

my place by our driver. We have com- 
missions to do for the hospital. As we pass 
we stop to look at the damage done to St. 
Eloi by the bombardment of seven months 
before. There is "No Admission," but re- 
pairs are busily afoot. The streets this 
morning are full of soldiers, sailors, military 
cars of all sorts, and ambulances. It is 
market day and the sketchy, brightly col- 
oured stalls of fruit, earthenware, and dress 
stuffs, are set up in crowded rows as in 
times of peace. It is a varied and hustling 
scene. Our shopping finished, we are purr- 
ing slyly past the sentinels at the town 
gates, when we are halted to show my pa- 
pers. I begin to feel of some importance in 
this zone where every one has his tag. 

In a few minutes we shall be in Belgium. 
The flush of being singled out, one of a few, 
to stand, as it were, for a moment by the 
bedside of a friend undone by his own 
chivalry, stirs me. How different it will be 
from the unconscious Belgium, rosy, healthy, 
and bustling, I knew at Bruges and at 
Zoute — ^when, tired, I had sought her 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 45 



strength among the sand dunes two years 
ago. My memory lingers over the peace 

of those autumn 
mornings — a sun 
haze on sturdy 
sails spread out 
to dry and half 
shading piles of 
glinting fish — 
and of nights 
broken only by 
the penetrating 
cry of the fishing 
smacks squawk- 
ing their way 
through the fog 
along the 
coast 
where 
German 
guns now 
He am- 
bushed. 

Away 
from city 




46 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

walls and from the challenge of sentry, a 
soldier asks us for a lift. We have no right 
to take him in but we stretch the letter of the 
law. He sits on the step at my feet. The 
air cuts our faces, stings our noses and ears, 
numbs us. A chilling white mist freezes our 
breath and sucks up the horizon. 

We speed along by the canal, lying on our 
left, shapes of its white, tranquil surface 
flicking in and out of a railing of poplars 
as coyly nonchalant as though its branching 
waters did not hide imprinted in their 
sluggish depths the agonized faces of Po- 
peringhe, Ypres, Armentieres, Furnes, Lille, 
and Dixmude. On our right, little villages flit 
past with their gaily washed stone cottages 
and their own sleepy backwaters of canal— 
so like the Baertsohn etchings of a past 
generation. 

Here and there a bombardment has 
violently broken up the wayward symmetry 
of quaint squares and dumpy streets, and its 
paroxysm has passed leaving suffocating 
heaps of debris and callous exposure of 
intimate domestic detail. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 47 



A kindly finger points out the *' sights" — 
my first view of trenches gashed in the flats 
along the roadside and of barbed wire en- 
tanglements, all the landmarks of a long 

drive later 
to become 
so poign- 
antly fa- 
miliar. On 
we fly, 
passing 
straggling 
companies 
of soldiers — zouaves, 
joyeux, poilus — until fi- 
nally, round a last cor- 
ner, past a high old 
windmill and our own 
private sentinel, we turn 
sharply into the hospital enclosure, the 
tricolour fluttering over its gate. 

The family is at dinner and gives us a 
kindly welcome and, what we need even 
more, hot soup. There is to be a great 
reunion of doctors this afternoon from all 




48 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

the countryside to discuss the treatment of 
clots of blood in haemorrhage and results 
obtained from the transfusion of blood. 

The soldier whose widow arrived with us 
is to be buried at 2 p.m. I change quickly 
into my nurse's dress and the life of a field 
hospital closes around me. 



THE SOLDIER'S FUNERAL 

Out of the endless muddy plains of western 
Belgium choose some three hundred yards, 
rather more muddy than the rest, and round 
them draw with a loose- jointed compass — 
so that the curve may wobble here and there 
and try more than once to escape at a tan- 
gent — a thick, black line. Press on your 
point until it sinks into the soft mud and 
your outline becomes a ditch. Then out 
of the sticky, fertile, inner rim of your ditch, 
draw up a hawthorn hedge, eight feet or so 
in height, and you have the site of our field 
hospital. 

On one side of this sticky field is a space 
given up to cars and ambulances, and known 
as the yard. It is bounded on its northeast 
side by low, ramshackle wooden shacks — 
one, open in front, the car-shed; the others 
closed and serving severally as cabins for 
the chauffeurs, storehouse, coal bin, and 



50 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

mortuary chapel. Between the mortuary- 
chapel and the next shack there is a space 
roofed over with planks to form a covered 
way which, in turn, opens upon a margin 
of our field and, through a low wooden door 
in the hedge, out on to the deeply rutted 
village road. 

The little chapel is hung all round and 
curtained in with unbleached calico, haunted 
by a taint of gangrene. A plain wooden 
cross hangs on the east side, and in the 
centre are trestles on which the bodies 
awaiting burial are laid — ^first in their 
shrouds, later in their plain deal coflSns 
covered with the tricolour of France. These 
coflSns — the lowest terms to which this, the 
last need of man, has been reduced — can 
be knocked together in twenty minutes the 
carpenter boasts. 

As I passed along one end of the yard I 
saw a group of poilus, their helmets on, 
their faded, mottled, horizon-blue overcoats 
looped back, their guns at rest with bayo- 
nets fixed. The supply wagon, that serves 
us as a hearse, stood under the covered way 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 51 

I 

in front of them, while at one side, leisurely 
putting a stole on over his uniform and pre- 
paring to officiate at a funeral, was one of 
our mobilized priests. 

A nurse, in her dark blue cloak, the small 
red cross on her white head-dress, stood a 
little apart from the rest, waiting. 

'*Laloux is to be buried,'* she whispered, 
*' won't you stay with me?" 

I have just arrived and the edge of emo- 
tion is cutting. Quietly we stand together, 
while the stretcher bearers go behind the 
curtains and presently reappear, carrying 
the coffin, which they slide into the supply 
wagon. On each of our coffins, for all deco- 
ration, is nailed a metal cross, and tenderly 
enough — allowing for the wear and tear of 
daily repetition — are laid a small wreath 
of yellow immortelles and a bunch of artifi- 
cial, rain-proof Parma violets. 

Silently we fall into place: first, an or- 
derly, carrying a long, thin, plain deal cross; 
then the soldier-priest in his stole, a half- 
open breviary in his hand, a finger in the 
burial service; then three soldiers abreast. 



52 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

with guns and bayonets fixed; behind these, 
the improvised hearse drawn by two shabby 
horses, with three more soldiers, on each 
side, in single file, three abreast immediately 
following. Twelve soldiers in all, twelve 
guns, twelve bayonets fixed. Behind the 
soldiers the stretcher bearers, followed by 
the solitary mourner who has come a twenty- 
four-hour journey to arrive too late, but 
not too late for death. After her walk nurses, 
officials, orderlies — any one who likes, out of 
curiosity or piety, to join our straggling 
procession. 

The gray, desolate day seems grayer and 
more desolate as we pick our way across 
puddles and ruts, trying to catch a rhythm 
in twelve heavy marching feet and oscillat- 
ing iron-bound wheels on rough-worn cob- 
ble stones. On, past the diminutive way- 
side chapel outside our farthest gate; round 
a bend in the road where the dilapidated 
windmill stands, raised on its high platform 
against the sky, and dragging ragged sails in 
monotonously repeated, jerky circles; on 
and on into the little village of one street. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



53 



over the bridge that spans the canal, with 
its half-inundated banks which turn broken 
mirrors up to a glowering sky. This canal 
is famous now, and will be famous as long as 




the history of Belgium is told, for the heroic 
resistance put up behind the scant refuge of 
its inhospitable banks to the untiring attacks 
of merciless gray hordes. 

Most of our men — ^many of them, I am 
told, old territorials ordered there to beat 
time, as they themselves would say, and be- 
cause in that "hot corner the less precious 
lives might best be thrown away" — were 



54 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

wounded within a few hundred yards of the 
bridge across which, to the heavy rhythm of 
tramping boots, we carry them dead. 

On and on we go, meeting weary convoys 
who — ^as they trudge in an opposite direc- 
tion, conscious that their turn may be the 
next — ^pay tribute by their expressionless 
faces and the dire simplicity of their salute, 
to the elemental dignity of death. 

We reach the little market at last, turn 
sharply to our left, and pass into the village 
church. There we pause for a part of our 
burial service — for the swung censer and the 
holy water sprinkled alike on living and on 
dead. Out and on through the north door 
to the farthest edge of the little churchyard^ 
where, circling a third of the space, row on 
row, four abreast, rough black wooden 
crosses, high as a man, tell their tale. 

On the back of each cross, the name, rank, 
and regiment are written. Over the upright 
stay of each hangs our little wreath of yellow 
immortelles; at the crossing of the arms the 
bunch of artificial violets which, if not fra- 
grant as other, violets are, give forth the 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 55 

faint perfume of man's sympathy, man's 
intention, struggling for expression. Row 
on row, four abreast — and now we add 
another to the number — with orange sand 
thinly sprinkled and tidily raked round each, 
lie our dead, each name a high-water mark of 
human endurance, while around and above, 
behind, beyond, and before, floats the im- 
mensity of gray desolation. 



TAKING A LOOK ROUND 

After the funeral and the medical debate 
— and a debate may be vitally interesting 
when practice dogs the heels of theory as 
breathlessly as it does here — we have tea 
in a little shack, haK dining-room, haK salon. 
Piles of toast are freshly made on the bright 
coal fire by the nurses as they drop in and 
out, or by the volunteer ambulance drivers 
who, in this pause, through puffs of smoke, 
tell one another the news of the day. 

We are on the very edge of Belgium, some 
five miles from the firing line, and only such 
of the wounded are brought to us as may 
not without danger be carried farther. On 
my way from the churchyard I had taken 
a look round. Within the space encircled 
by our hedge there are sixteen wooden 
shacks in all, eight of them wards in which 
about one hundred and forty patients can 
be cared for. Among the other sights 

56 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 57 

Miss Carr (or "Night Hawk," as the 
Canadian nurse, my companion at the 
fmieral, humorously calls herself) had 
pointed out to me the operating room with 
its radiographic cabinet, the pharmacy, the 
sailed^ attente or waiting room, the wash-house 
with the linen room or lingerie^ and the 
doctors' quarters. The remainder, eked out 
by tents, some gray, some green, are sleep- 




ing quarters for the staff. All the shacks 
and tents are connected by narrow walks 
or trottoirs which thread quite picturesquely 
back and forth across our muddy enclosure. 
After tea I take possession of the cur- 
tained-ofif portion of one of the shacks 
shared by three. This corner is to be my 



58 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

shelter. Privacy is almost as far from this 
life as from a camper's. On the other side 
of a divided somewhat skirapy curtain is a 
passage with a door at each end. It does 
not make so much difference as one might 
think whether the doors are open or shut. 
Everything blows, creaks, and flaps to- 
gether. Even the roofs, as I discovered 
later, in a high wind sometimes let go their 
grip of the walls. One feels much as a 
spider might in a tight crevice of bark with 
leaves for curtains. 

High up in the centre of the roof is the 
common electric light, usually — as no one 
here has rigidly regular hours — ^left burning 
until 10 p. M., when the lights automatically 
go out all over the hospital. We are heated 
fitfully by a coal fire which, lighted in the 
morning, is left to its own devices or to a 
chance passing hand for its replenishing. 
The floor is covered with green linoleum, 
our greatest asset in the all- permeating 
dampness of these Belgian plains. I have 
a bedstead and mattress, exact replica of 
the soldiers' beds; a small washstand; a 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 59 

deal cupboard; two canvas chairs; a mirror 
in a steel frame, one foot by nine inches — 
not calculated in its oblique summing-up of 
one's person to increase self-assurance; and, 
happiest possession of all, a shelf running 
the whole length of one side of the room to 
hold our books and odds and ends. 



DETAILS 

December 14. 

The green-painted shacks with their fur- 
nishings are the gift of an American woman, 
Miss de Courtney, to the French Govern- 
ment. She is Golden Godmother and Direc- 
tress of the hospital and on her devolves the 
responsibility of choosing and superintend- 
ing the nurses. The medical staff, orderlies, 
most of the surgical instruments and ap- 
pliances as well as the rations are supplied by 
the French Government and are under the 
supervision of the Service de Sante. The 
Directress gives me a few details and touches 
on the psychology of the hospital very 
lightly, for she is going to take me for a first 
round of the wards. While I wait for her a 
shutter snaps in my mind and I see again, 
ominously vivid, the salon ornaments and 
the railway station at Paris. 

60 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 61 

In the evening my job is given to me. I 
am to take charge of the waiting room and 
be always within earshot of its three whistles 
announcing new arrivals; to direct the linen 
room; order and receive supplies, and write 
the business letters. Christmas is upon us 
and the Directress goes on leave on the 
twenty-sixth. Will I take her place during 
her absence, preside at the nurses' meals and, 
in her stead, I seem dimly to perceive, 
be general whipping-boy .^^ Her berth is, I 
imagine, not too easy a one, for she must 
keep a hand on the rudder and steer straight 
in this lake of slight but fundamental racial 
differences of method, of ideals and their 
implication. Evidently being at a field 
hospital is not, for me, to mean primarily 
caring for wounded soldiers. I fall asleep 
rather uneasily in my cot. 

December 15. 

During the night I was awakened with 
a start by the light going up in our shack. 
A man was brought to the hospital who had 
to be operated on immediately. He was 



62 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

drunk, had refused to give the password, 
and had attacked one of the sentinels who 
shot him through the abdomen. He has 
just died murmuring, "Maman, MamanJ' 
One of the nurses tells me this is extraor- 
dinarily often these men's last word. 

He was a big strong chap of twenty-five 
or so and, had he lived, it would have been 
to be court-mar tialled. After my first visit 
to the wards — this. A sense of the fragility 
and cheapness of life overwhelms me. 

The Linen Room 

December 16. 

There is a rift in the lute this morning. 
The mobilized Franciscan monk, M. Baron 

, a devoted, capable man, twin-pillar 

(with his friend, the priest, genial, witty 
M. Tessac) of the wash-house and the linen 
room — is to be removed by the War Office. 
He keeps the accounts, knows all the ropes, 
and is invaluable to the Directress generally 
and to me in particular, for was he not to 
take my inexperience and point out the way 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 63 

to me through the intricacies of this part of 
my work? 

Steps will be taken to try and keep him — 
demarches again. They sprout everywhere 
like toadstools at the roots of conflicting 
personal interests. 

I spend a busy afternoon being crammed 
by M. Baron in the organization of the linen 
room. Besides Baron and Tessac, there is a 
dear, hard-working girl, Marie, a Belgian 
refugee, through whose clever fingers most 
of the mending and darning passes. There 
is a basket under the table where she works, 
into which torn and buttonless things from 
all over the hospital are put, always with a 
joke and "for one of your spare moments, 
Marie." Two or more afternoons a week 
another workwoman comes to help with the 
patching of the uniforms and underclothes 
that have been slit up for the first bandag- 
ings at the dressing stations, or cut and torn 
when taken off the severely wounded in the 
waiting room. These clothes are disin- 
fected and washed, then repaired and given 
back to their owners the day they leave us 



64 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



for a base hospital or, as often, given to 
some one else, since their owners not infre- 
quently move on before the clothes are 
ready — a shifting of possessions which brings 
about the pathetic and humorous parade of 

misfits daily passing 
through our salle 
d'attente. 

The French Gov- 
ernment replaces all 
uniforms too badly 
damaged for further 
use and the Golden God- 
mother, with the help 
of friends in England and 
America, has very gen- 
erously set herself the task 
of seeing that the men who 
pass under her care shall have, not only 
the best surgical aid and nursing possible, 
but a full outfit of warm and suitable cloth- 
ing. Compared to most other field hospitals 
ours is luxurious and pampered, taking 
delight even in the colour scheme of each 
of its wards. To provide for these needs 




A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



65 



is the principal work of the lingerie, which 
is something like a little shop where every- 
thing — ^from bandages, needles, chocolate. 




and cigarettes, to crutches, warm sweaters, 
nails, toothbrushes, combs, mirrors, and 
slates — is to be found. Cases and bales 
arrive every month from London bringing 



66 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

us supplies, even pyjamas, which the poilus 
look upon as a form of swanky sport suit 
to be worn only out-of-doors on sunny days, 
never in bed. 

We have to keep up big fires and con- 
stantly move our possessions about to fight 
encroaching mildew, for not only is the 
lowest dampest edge of the field our por- 
tion, but steam from our nearest neighbour, 
the wash-house, filters under the door and 
through all the cracks, defying the tarred 
paper with which we have tried to barricade 
ourselves against its inroads. 

The nurses drop in and out searching our 
stores to humour the wide-swinging needs 
of their patients, and all day long orderlies, 
the lists of linen sent from their wards to the 
laundry in their hands, come with their 
baskets to be replenished from our shelves. 

From the windows, through blots of 
scarlet geraniums, we have a bird's-eye 
view of the nearest village, with the spotted 
reptile of continually moving troops crawl- 
ing through its single straggling street. 

The spirit of our linen room is gay and 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 67 

charming. If the present personnel remains 
unchanged, I shall enjoy my work here very 
much. 

The nursing staff of the "Boite'' — as we 
call the hospital, by reason of its boxlike, 
circumscribing limits — consists of three 
American, one Australian, three English, 
and three French nurses, with from ninety 
to a hundred orderlies and lesser oflScers 
variously employed. 

Later, . 

After tea there is a carol practice. The 
Directress has a sweet voice. One of the 
French nurses, Madame de Parme, plays 
the accompaniments con amore; another. 
Mademoiselle Basine, takes seconds. She 
has no more than a good note or two, but 
all the Latin vocal formulas. It goes. The 
other nurses join in the refrains. 

Cannon have been going all day — British 
cannon preparing for an offensive they say. 
And report also has it that the Germans are 
massing on this front. 



SHADOW PICTURES 

December 17. 

The Directress is of medium height with a 
wide, pale, young face and clear, golden- 
brown eyes. A becoming large lawn hand- 
kerchief folded diagonally and tightly fas- 
tened round her head lets only little loops of 
hair escape above her ears. She evokes 
sympathy and interest by a something 
which though nunlike carries no sense of 
convent walls. Under a certain languor of 
manner she is executive. Yet — artist and 
moralist in one — she is lovable. Her hon- 
esty struggles with her aspirations, as the 
artist in her guesses at many sides of a 
question. To keep a steady hand on the 
reins of government an administrator should, 
perhaps, wear blinkers. But how can the 
floating eye of an artist keep them on? 
The temperament of Madame de Parme, 

68 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 69 

playfully dubbed *' Moral Influence," gives 
her weight here. She is of sound French 
lineage, flying highly coloured kites of chiv- 
alric tradition, and related, it would seem, 
by virile, widespread ramifications of uncles, 
aunts, and cousins, to half the aristocracy of 
France. Dark and very pleasant to look 
at, her simple nurse's dress worn with the 
trim formfulness of her race, she is warm- 
hearted, impulsive, staunch to her friends, 
generous and devoted to the men. She is 
also — ^must I own it? — not without her 
touch of vanity which glories in frankness 
of speech, unassailable righteousness, and 
the safety of her anchorage below the shoals 
of mere social veneer or wealth. Her im- 
petuous partisanship restlessly seeks for 
motives in waste places and the pollen of 
her quick, perhaps too irresponsible, tongue 
is apt to be carried on the hurrying feet of 
the Boite and easily crossbreeds. 

Her friend. Mademoiselle Basine, a pro- 
fessional woman, is big and blonde with a 
broad, open face and blue eyes. She has a 
vaguely barer family tree than has Moral 



70 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

Influence, but a stronger head. She is very 
capable, generous-hearted, fair-minded, 
somewhat arrogantly unconscious of the 
limits of her own prerogatives perhaps, for 
when perplexed by administrative ways the 
tip of her witty tongue is capable of a bitter 
sting. But she is a pleasant companion, 
fond of books, and enjoying a good comrade- 
ship with many of their writers, born of her 
life in Paris. Of her the doctors say: 
^'Quand il y a trois hommes et Basine, cela 
fait quatre,'' and it is meant as a compliment. 
Madame Thomas, the third of our French 
nurses, is the wife of a sergeant in the 
trenches, from whom our vaguemestre — anx- 
iously laid in wait for by us all — brings her a 
daily letter. She is a self-effacing, self-sac- 
rificing, kind little woman with a Croix de 
Guerre of her own, won in a hospital in 
Poperinghe during the first of its terrible bom- 
bardments. Not a nurse by profession, she 
has been trained by the war and, though with- 
out any of the energetic initiative of Moral 
Influence or La Basine, she is painstaking 
and reliable. Her tiny figure, barely five 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 71 

feet high and all in white, is further dwarfed 
by a pair of large black rubber waders with- 
out which she never ventures from her room 
on the farther side of a neighbouring muddy 
field where she has taken up her abode, for 
she looks with suspicion on our more or less 
open-air nights. Romantically religious and 
with a somewhat inflated respect for author- 
ity, she feels a maternal concern and herself 
responsible for the virtues and foibles of 
those committed to her care. 

Within Sight of Christmas 

December 18. 

Christmas gallops up. Our Golden God- 
mother has inundated us with bales and 
cases. I am told off to unpack them in an 
empty ward and to sort them with the help 
of a plump little gentleman who in peace 
times is in the aeroplane business. He is 
middle-aged and has a_^ not-too-secret pride 
in his villa on the Riviera and in the life of 
ease he and an evidently fashionable wife 
lead there. 



72 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

His very short arms and unused, chubby 
hands have an air of flippers, and we know 
him as "The Penguin." He has been 
mobihzed for more than a year and is the 
most bored person I have ever met. The 
administration appoints him my aide-de- 
camp. We pass the comphments of the 
season and then stand looking at mounds of 
stuff to be unpacked. 

Presently he produces a penknife and 
begins to open the bales, cutting stitch by 
stitch and leaving it to me to solve the 
greater mystery of opening the cases. As 
coloured balls, tinsel, crackers, and candles 
come tumbling out in fairy-like profusion 
and are spread out on the beds, he ambles 
slowly round, delicately appraising each 
object and, holding it up to the light, ejacu- 
lates: ''How curious, how weird! What 
purpose can it possibly serve .^" The incon- 
gruity of all this flimsy glitter on a stage 
grim with the dramas of yesterday and to- 
morrow perhaps chills a more sympathetic 
interest in our festive symbols. 

There are cigarettes and presents for all 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 73 



the orderlies and several presents for each 
of the wounded. Stockings of pink and 
green tarletan, which are to be filled with 
sweets, oranges, nuts, and crackers, sea- 
soned with the 
popular dwarf 
packets of 
playing cards, 
dominoes, 
and tobacco, 
are to be hung 
on the beds to 
enliven the 
Christmas- 
morning 
awakening. 
The presents 
are to be 
marked with 
the names of the wounded and for this each 
nurse must be taken apart and asked to 
furnish a list of her charges with a word on 
their characters and tastes. It will take all 
the leisure of the next few days to sort and 
label them, and more plastic minds than 




74 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

the Penguin's to cling to our playthings 
under the swooping shadow of pain and 
death. 

December 19. 

A furious cannonade went on all last night 
like a heavy bass to bellowing gusts of wind. 
At first we could distinguish the different 
calibres of the guns, but it soon turned into a 
distant bullying roar. 

There have been only two operations this 
morning. A leg was amputated, and splin- 
ters of bone were taken out of an adjutant's 
shoulder. He refused an anaesthetic for, 
since the outbreak of the war, he has lost a 
father and a brother on the operating table. 
Every one was relieved when it was over. 
He has just been brought back to bed and 
the doctors feel satisfied that they will pull 
him through. 



WARD I. THE TELEPHONE 



^P 


1 




^ 


i 


1 


fULIillaJk — '(^.jijMwYJIfBlHfc 




1 



He was a 
telephon- 
ist in the 
trenches 
and, they 
told me, 
the son of 
a country 

doctor. Twenty years or so old, with a 
thick crop of black hair worn rather long, 
and dark, languid eyes. A beautiful boy and 
an only son — to the last so delicately careful 
of his person that the life of the rank and file 
could have been little less than a crucifixion 
to him. 

He came in with typhoid fever and ap- 
pendicitis. They operated. Days passed 
and he grew worse. Those who looked on 

75 



76 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

called to his father, to his uncle, way-worn 
men to whom he was all the world. They 
came. Then a fistula developed and he lay 
there suffering, irritable, exacting, and alien, 
while those two forlorn men hung with 
anxious faces over his bed — No. 9 it was — 
on which the fight with death was fought by 
doctors, nurses, and by those two, to whom 
he was all the world. Another and more 
terrible operation relieved the strain for a 
time and gave him back to them, gentle, 
thoughtful, and full of tales through which 
flashed the heroism, humour, and patience 
of the trenches. 

For six lagging weeks the sympathy and 
science of the hospital clung to the chance 
of saving him, of saving those three lives. 
But death held on hungrily to him. In his 
delirium he was back in the trenches again, 
the receiver in his hand, feverishly active 
as message after message reached him and 
had to be sent on. 

Suddenly his excitement grew. He was 
in the fury of bursting shells. 

"The Germans are coming! They come! 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 77 

They come ! Sauvez vous^ camarades I Les 
bodies sont la , , . Alio, No. 129? 
Yes, I'm still here. What was that.^^ 
What " 

The pause was strained with the agony 
of attention. Then the muscles relaxed into 
a creeping smile and the lips moved again : 

^'Ah, ca y est, maintenant, Le hon Dieu 
est a VappareiL'' 

The boy was dead. 



SHADOW PICTURES AGAIN 

December 20. 

Our Medecin-chef, old M. Lussan, is both 
soldier and doctor. He is tall and spare, 
with the long, bowed legs of a cavalry 
officer, and a great susceptibility to feminine 
blandishment. He is a family man to the 
point of being a grandfather, and more 
interested, perhaps, in the discipline and 
domestic details of the hospital than in the 
work of the operating room. His is one of 
our most characteristic silhouettes, for he 
keeps an eye on every trifle and is never for 
long off our stage. No one can leave the 
hospital without his permission and a pass 
bearing his stamp, nor can any repair or the 
smallest innovation be made without his con- 
sent. The doctors indulgently support him, 
for he has a light hand with them, but the 
orderlies find him stern and uncompromising. 

78 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 79 

Most of the operations are skilfully per- 
formed by M. Che vert, known by the men 
as *'Ze Chic Type.'' Theoretically under M. 
Lussan, in reality he holds the reins. He is 
what the French call un hel homme — tall, 
dark, pale, and masterful, with a certain 
naive latin satisfaction in his heaven-born 
male superiority and a mirthless, non-com- 
mittal smile. He is, moreover, a highly 
specialized laparotomist and popular with 
the wounded who dimly divine his science 
and are cheered by his good-fellowship and 
by his unwearying readiness to answer their 
call at any hour of the day or night. 

Of our staff is also a short, fair, lonely 
man with a sad, gentle face. A physician 
only when the war began, he has become no 
mean surgeon on his own account and is 
now right hand to the Chic Type. His is 
one of the most familiar figures here as he 
passes, bent on his work, up and down the 
plank-walks. He is patient with the men 
and very kind, careful, and ''lucky" with 
his cases. Many a horribly infected wound 
has healed under his painstaking touch. We 



80 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

know him as Pere Corneiller and call upon 
him to cure the small ailings of the Bolte. 
And he comes graciously and willingly but 
never without that little impersonal air of 
disillusionment which is so much of himself. 
Called one day to one of the nurses to stop 
a feverish cold, he looked wistfully round 
her little coop with its photographs and inti- 
mate touches and sighed: "How feminine 
and charming this all is!" That started us 
wondering about him. 

Every week the hospital is inspected by 
M. Muret, inspecteur-general with a title 
of General by courtesy. 

He is an old man of Alsatian origin and 
accent who never ceases to repeat, "Alas, 
alas, I knew German as a boy." He is, I 
think, shrewd rather than intelligent, mettle- 
some where his dignity is concerned, but 
thaws easily, becoming friendly and gentle. 
He does not seem to be popular here. I 
suppose inspectors never are, but he has, I 
think, no more than a normal dose of 
obliquity in his make-up, though he is some- 
times in need of ingenuity to patch up the 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 81 

consequences of his spleen. His teeth are 
kept sharp on small bones he picks with 
Moral Influence and La Basine who accuse 
him of being the tool of his favourites and 
who make the inspection of their work some- 
thing of a thorn in the old man's side. We 
share the honour of being inspected by 
him with certain sections of the front-row 
trenches and many other sketchy institu- 
tions needing the eye of a paternal govern- 
ment to keep them toeing the line. 

He has a great friendship for M. de 
Precy — of rather wooden build and perhaps 
over-conciliatory manner — ^his pupil in good 
old bygone days in Bordeaux, now chief 
surgeon of one of the auto-chirurgical or 
mobile operating rooms, which with others 
of its kind has cost France so many thou- 
sand francs. This auto-chir, as they are 
called, has a staff of its own of fifteen doctors 
and surgeons, and a complete radiographic 
and surgical outfit. But almost since the 
outbreak of the war, by some kink in the 
administrative tape, it has stood idle and 
not more than a stone's throw from our 



82 A GEEEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

gates. The Directress had offered its fifteen 
doctors, when she knew of their pUght, two 
of our wards to do with them as they pleased, 
nurse their own cases, make their own re- 
searches. She had even gone so far as to 
say that they might be free of our operating 
room to help there whenever there was a 
rush and share with our very own doctors 
the much-coveted surgical experiences of 
the front. 




THE SALLE D'ATTENTE 



4 P.M. 

We have had a busy day with the bright 
coloured thread of our bit to do running 
through it. Miss Wolton (one of the EngUsh 
nurses) and I ask for pass-cards. We must 
go to the nearest village to buy ribbons and 
fancy papers to tie up the Christmas parcels. 
We are just starting when the three whistles 
sound. Four wounded are brought in. It 
is my initiation to the work of the salle 
d'attente — the portal of the hospital — 
which is to be my principal field of activity 
here. 

The men arrive — ^huddled. Inarticulate 
bundles of pain and misery with stone-cold 

83 



84 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

feet and chattering teeth. Their boots and 
puttees are caked with mud and their clothes 
stiff with blood and dirt. The bandages 
that have been put on at the outposts are 
not removed in the salle d'attente, except in 
case of haemorrhage or other especial need, 
but the men are undressed, laid on beds, and 
given hot-water bottles. The belongings of 
each are piled by his bed, and an inventory 
is taken by the priest-orderly on duty there, 
another part of whose business it is to oflBci- 
ate at the funerals. If the wounded have 
any valuables, they are given over, in ex- 
change for a receipt, to the administration, 
which takes charge of them until their 
owners leave the hospital. The men's 
names, their wives' names, their addresses, 
and the numbers of their regiments are 
written down. The less valuable contents 
of their pockets, which we often tell them 
are like small junk-shops, are emptied into 
coloured cotton treasure-bags. These follow 
them to their wards and are hung at the head 
of their beds. It is in these bags that they 
keep their most precious trophy of all — 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 85 

their splinters of shell — when the surgeon Is 
fortunate enough to extract them and they 
lucky enough to survive the ordeal. 

After the doctor on duty has seen them 
and given his orders, we scrub them thor- 
oughly, as much to warm them as to clean 
them, though after days In the trenches a 
scrub Is generally only too necessary. When 
they are washed and a warm cotton-flannel 
night-shirt has been put on they are wrapped 
in blankets and packed off to their wards or, 
in the more urgent cases, to the operating 
room, there often to lie on their stretchers 
on the floor awaiting their turn. That, 
when it happens, seems to me the hardest 
of all tests of their endurance: the strange 
faces, smell of ether, passing and repassing 
of stretchers with their loads, sound of 
groans, and often sight of blood, of horribly 
exposed wounds and glinting instruments, 
before their turn comes round. But they 
generally arrive in batches and, in a field 
hospital, space and the number of surgeons 
are limited. Every one is working at top 
speed; there can be no breaks, no delays. 



86 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

The cases must be ready to be taken one 
after another in the order of their greatest 
need. 

Of the four blesses just brought in, it 
first falls to my lot to wash a boy of twenty- 
two, Louis, as gay as a cricket — "rather a 
low type" the nurse who hands him over to 
me whispers. He has only stumps for toes 
on one foot, frost-bitten during last winter's 
campaign. This time he has a bullet wound 
under his arm, a torn ear, a scalp wound, 
and ominously bandaged thighs. 

I wash all of him that is not bandaged. 
He boasts of his home, of his aunt, of her 
money. He tells me his wounds "are of no 
consequence — all but, perhaps, the thighs." 
His lieutenant had asked for a volunteer. 
It was a desperate job and Louis had of- 
fered himself. He got through and was on 
his way back, elated, when a bomb ex- 
ploded behind him. 

"I hope I shall soon be well and get at 
those boches again." 

In the excitement of the feat and of still- 
overstrained nerves he talks volubly. I 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 87 

cover him up to rest while two of the others 
are being washed — one a young boy with a 
wounded eye who pours out a torrent of 
curses on every one who comes near him. 
His eyes are bandaged and he is evidently 
still frightened. We are strangers. His 
experience perhaps holds memories of weak- 
ness and helplessness not too tenderly dealt 
with. I wish they would all curse. Had 
they a background of drawing rooms they 
would — for our sakes. We might then feel 
less abashed by their monstrous patience, 
their disconcerting confidence and gratitude. 
The forlorn profane one and his friend are 
carried away to their wards. 

We chaff Louis in return for his gay sallies 
and tell him that, since he says there is so 
little the matter with him, we are sending 
his pals on first. He answers : 

"Right you are; I can wait; my wounds 
are nothing, except perhaps the thighs." 

The fourth boy, Etienne, with a bad head- 
wound, is screaming and struggling. The 
startling pallor of his nude, tossed limbs 
reminds me of Michelangelo's drawing of 



88 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

Tityus. He is quieted and sent off to his 
ward. The last to go is Louis. As he is 
Ufted on to the stretcher he winces and 
whispers something to one of the kindly 
bearers whose face grows very grave. All 
four are of the notorious Foreign Legion. 



THE OLD CIVILIAN 

December 21. 

They came up from the village. An old 
man is ill there. The village doctor is away. 
Will the Medecin-chef be very good and 
admit him as a favour to the hospital so 
near their home? ''We cherish, love, and 
dote on this old man. If no help is to be 
given us, he will die." 

The Medecin-chef says yes. So they bring 
the old civilian and lay him on a bed. 
Before we know it they have vanished. 

We draw near. The old man is so weak 
he cannot give his name. We strip him and 
— turn away our heads. 

He lies on the bed before us all, abject 
in the wantonness of his emaciation. The 
brazen bones and sinews raise and stretch 
the withered yellow skin into ridges with 
gray hollows in between and push their 

89 



90 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



joint-heads through red raw spots In Its 
tenuous fragility. The prism-shaped Hmbs 
end in fans of long, spiked finger nails and 
turned-up, horn-spiked toes. The head, with 
what had once been a gentle, large-eyed face. 
Is tasselled with spears of gray hair grounded 
now with filth. Filth cakes his body — filth 
oozing from within, filth grinding from with- 
out, mixed in with dust and wisps of straw 
squeezed of its moisture and pressed into a 
compact mass by the dead weight of a help- 
less body. 

The old man cannot 
speak. He opens his 
deep-set eyes with the 
piteous appeal of a 
dog ambushed to die. 



We speak to him. 




A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 91 

The doctor comes and — turns away. 

"Where is his family? He has been 
starved." 

No one can find his family. 

* ' Who will take him in ? We cannot keep a 
starved old man . We are not here for that . " 

The village shuts its lips. No one knows 
where he came from, no one will take him in. 
He is old; he is dying. His horny hands 
have worked hard while they could. His 
muscles will contract no longer; there is 
nothing he can do. 

We fetch our basin, our soap, our scissors, 
our clean, warm towels. We come near him. 

The orderly gently lifts the shrunken brit- 
tle body. He turns away his head and spits. 
Yet is not this his father — is not this himself .^^ 
The nurse dips her glove in the hot water, 
soaps it, and bends over him. She turns 
away her head and clears her throat. Here is 
her mother — here herself — the silent end 
of long, close years of planning, saving, 
striving. No one wants him. He has noth- 
ing more to offer life. They scrape away the 
filth; they wash him; they rub the flaccid 



92 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

skin with alcohol; anoint, powder, hide from 
sight his dreadful sores. They labour to 
make him alluring to Death. 

He opens his eyes, but he never speaks. 
Those who brought him in have seen to that. 
He can never tell on them. They kept him 
until he could never tell on them. He will 
play no dirty trick on them, but they can 
play a dirty trick on us. How sharp those 
people were. He will not die in their house; 
no questions will be asked. But he will die 
in our house. 

We have washed away the straw. No one 
knows from whose stable the straw came. 

He is warm and clean and decent and his 
eyelids are a little stronger. We carry him 
to a ward. We put him in a bed where the 
lusty and yearned-for have passed on their 
way before him. 

He clings to life and counts his hours out 
to the very last. Eleven hours more and 
then he dies. 

There are many kinds of soldiers. 

Now he counts among our dead. 



IN THE WINGS 

December 22. 

News comes that the demarches have suc- 
ceeded and M. Baron is to stay. Every one 
is pleased, especially I who depend on his 
help. At dusk I go to the linen room on an 
errand. Outside I meet one of the mobil- 
ized priests. He detains me on the foot 
path and pours out a tale. A newcomer, I 
should be forewarned. As he sees the situa- 
tion, the hospital just now sits on a volcano. 
The eye of the auto-chir, when turned on us 
and on our many privileges, gleams, it 
would seem, very green — too green for the 
tolerance of our own doctors who look 
warily askance at the intruders. Only a 
spark is needed to fire the mine. There is 
also, he hints, something almost approach- 
ing soreness between the French and Anglo- 
Saxon elements— the French under irksome 

93 



94 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

obligation to foreign bounty, to say nothing 
of resentment simmering in the heart of one 
of their nurses — Madame de Clisson, now 
absent — to whom it has been intimated that 
at the end of her leave she need not return. 

The situation is anything but simple, for 
through spokes of wheel within wheel as 
they revolve in his hands I can catch elusive 
glimpses of romance, jealousy, and piqued 
pride plying their fans. Madame de Clis- 
son had not only been hand in glove with 
the High Command, but with the staff of the 
auto-chir who — the other French nurses 
also make it out (and who should know 
better than they.f^) — are nothing but un- 
scrupulous place-hunters ambushed behind 
our hedge and quite willing to play Madame 
de Clisson's game for her if by so doing they 
can bait their own lines for stripes. "Per- 
haps the brimming cup even now trickles 
over. . . ." 

Is all this merely morbid imagination flow- 
ering in this somewhat unnatural isolation or 
do subterranean fires really rumble — and at 
no great depth — under the mud of our placid- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 95 

looking field? I barely yet know the names 
of these people and am bewildered by their 
spiritual arabesques, lost in the labyrinth 
of their reactions. I reassure myself with 
the thought that truth has many faces and 
any one of them alone is a lie. 

I go for enlightenment to the Directress. 
As to smarting French susceptibilities, she 
waves the suggestion from her. It is cer- 
tainly evident that the auto-chir resents 
its idleness, but why imagine that it also 
resents us.^ In any case, she has done what 
she could for it and, if there is fault any- 
where, it is perhaps a pardonable one in 
the capable Chic Type and La Basine, 
both so enamoured of their work that they 
prefer to slave day and night rather than 
let doctors from outside take any part. 

In my den, behind my curtain, I think it 
over — the many sides of this situation. 
Motley race differences lie dormant in us. 
Here we have a hospital offered by American 
capital and — ^yes, accepted. But we all 
know that to accept is not always as easy 
as it seems. It may even be possible that 



96 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

the sensitiveness of French pride sometimes 
loses sight of the dignity of its need and is 
inchned to squirm under what may look like 
patronage — a feeling that shamefacedly 
translates itself into forms so alien to the 
original reaction that American capital 
stumbles in hurt confusion. 

Now, the most vexatious part of life in 
the war zone is the sense of being shut in. 
Here in the Boite are about three hundred 
people, counting the wounded, and the key 
is figuratively turned on them with their 
three himdred active minds, their hetero- 
geneous tastes, their varying social condi- 
tions, their racial blindness to the other 
man's problem, and, under it all, the baffling 
irritation of war with its long-drawn-out, 
quiveringly suspended menace. Small won- 
der if at times the ice is thin. A French- 
man can never realize our American funda- 
mental naivete. He is not simple himself 
but proud and complex. He is annoyed 
by what he thinks our incomprehensible 
lack of reserve and form when it is nothing 
but a degree of national opaqueness to one 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 97 

kind of light. The French cherish the 
bureaucrat in all his forms and numbers. 
They love discipline in such a place as 
this. 

Young Americans hate restraint. They 
lightly undertake all that comes their way 
but somewhat reluctantly go clear-eyed to 
the logical end of an endeavour. At home 
our antennae have not needed to become 
sensitized to foreign reation; there has been 
plenty of room for contemptuous indiffer- 
ence and we have little real flexibility. Our 
facile assumption and self-confidence, our 
deep, instinctive suspicion of all that is not 
American, brought cheek by jowl with the 
keen French mind, its unformulated but 
rigid traditions of manner and speech, in 
bottomless reserves, its trenchant intellect- 
ualism, its dire thoroughness of method and 
almost equally strong distrust — to say noth- 
ing of its humorous compassion — for all that 
is not French, put the easy-going Americans 
at a disadvantage. When not happily un- 
conscious he is irked by what he cannot 
quite size up. We Americans still trail 



98 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

» - ,, 

nebulous envelopes while pressure has solidi- 
fied and crystallized the French. 

Neither is it easy for us to understand 
the objective dramatic quality of the French 
mind. Its unemotional clarity sees life in 
terms of art. What we crudely sum up in 
them as dissension even as intrigue is gener- 
ally no more than the interplay of vivid, 
sharpened imaginations working themselves 
out into a witty indulgence of each other's 
highly individualized and widely varying 
points of view and a breezy criticism of 
more phlegmatic reactions. 

Evidently I shall have a chance here to 
indulge my own small passion — ^just to 
understand. And what if life at the front, 
for all its self-denials, should not be without 
a pinch of its old flavouring? Yet I begin 
to be a little uneasy about the future. 
Vivere non est necesse, navigare necesse est. 




THE CARPENTER 

December 23. 

"I'm thirsty, sister, dying of thirst. Give 
me a drink. I'm thirsty, oh! so thirsty 
— a httle wine! At home I have a cellar, 
so cool, and the good country wine quenches 
thirst. Only a little drink, good sister — a 
few drops. Why do you refuse? A throat- 
ful, and I will say no more." 

"My friend, you must be patient. Your 
turn comes next. They will operate on you 
presently. After that I will give you wine 
with a little water — not your good Sarthe 
wine, perhaps, but the best that we can get 
for you here. The doctor has promised. 
Now you must let me give you this. Don't 
look so scared of the needle. It will hardly 
hurt you. There! The worst is over, and it 
will help you to bear your thirst. And if 
you will be good and not swallow it you 

99 



100 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

may hold this piece of lemon in your mouth. 
There, there — is it not better now?" 

The poor head moved restlessly on the 
pillow, first to one side, then to the other. 
The thin livid lips trembled and continued 
to wail softly, "Oh, so thirsty — ^thirsty — 
thirsty " 

Panquelin, for that was his name, had 
been brought in during the night, both feet 
blown to pieces, his card said, by a shell. 
A violent haemorrhage had so weakened 
him that from the first the doctors shook 
their heads. They would do what they 
could. Care and his natural sturdiness 
would have to do the rest. 

He was a strange, unsoldierlike looking 
man, below the average height, black- 
haired and plump, with a perfectly round 
head and face in which were set perfectly 
round, black eyes edged with short, black 
lashes. The eyebrows seemed parts of a 
curve almost geometrically drawn, so per- 
fectly round was his brow. His hands were 
small with short fingers and thick, chubby 
palms, and the poor chunky lower limbs 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 101 

were bandaged almost to the hips. All 
black and white he lay there with drawn, 
blue lips. 

We sat long by his bed waiting, trying to 
warm and stimulate him, trying to prepare 
him for what was to come. It seemed to 
ease him to talk; and in the intervals of his 
torturing thirst, when his lips had just been 
moistened, he told me of his home. 

"We were five brothers at the beginning 
of the war. Now I and one other only 
are left. He is in the trenches. I was cook 
to my colonel. Last night while we were 
lighting a fire that infernal shell burst. 
To think it should reach us there! The 
scullery boy was killed on the spot, and my 
feet — ^I have never seen anything like it — 
pools of blood ! Ah, cochons de boches ! 
Us m'ont hien " 

'' Courage, mon vieux, it may yet be all 
right. We sometimes do wonders here. 
You will see." 

"You are very good, my sister, but you 
have not seen my feet. Will you write to 
my wife for me? I should not like her to be 



102 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

anxious, poor girl. My wound will cause 
her much chagrin. We have five small 
children, such a nice little house — two rooms, 
a kitchen, a cellar, a vegetable garden, too; 
and I was getting on. Carpenters when they 
are good can always make their way. You 
see I mend old furniture. There is so much 
in our parts and there is money in it." 

*'What you say interests me. When you 
are well you shall mend a cupboard of mine 
which they tell me is old Sarthe." 

"Ah, you have a cupboard, an old one? 
Thick heavy walnut wood, four men cannot 
lift it? I know the kind well. They make 
none like that now, all is Ville de Paris, I 
will soon show you what a good job I can 
do on yours. It shall be like new. Oh, 
but I'm thirsty, parched with thirst ! When 
are they coming for me, good sister?" 

How long they have been away. We 
keep his bed warm and peer again and again 
through the windows, across the pond 
where our heedless ducks preen them- 
selves and cackle, to the closed door of the 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 103 

operating room. We grow strained and 
restless waiting for it to open. Ah, here at 
last come the stretcher bearers, the red 
blankets over the stretcher. We see them 




front view only as 
they move toward us 
through the blue 
twilight. Our door 
swings open. 

"Where is the 
shoulder that comes next, madame.^" 

"In bed 9, But Panquelin.^^ Have they 
not finished with him yet?" 

"Does one operate on a corpse when so 
many wait? And could we have stood 



104 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

much more of this — ^his wife, his five chil- 
dren, his two rooms, his kitchen, his cellar, 
his little vegetable garden and 'Ah me, 
ah me, write gently to my wife!' — listening 
to that story for two hours with his round 
eyes looking at one while they cut oflF his 
legs, first one and then the other? Oh. 
they gave him a hypodermic and hung up 
a sheet to screen his legs. He could not 
see what they were doing and he felt no 
pain. Monsieur le major was epatant, but 
I tell you it was uncanny. One may well 
be seasoned. This is more than surgery; 
it is horror." 

Small Parts 

December 24. 

We are hurrying on the preparations for 
Christmas which have occupied every 
breathing-space of the week. The days 
are so full that yesterday is divided from 
me by a gulf. This morning there were two 
newcomers, big stretcher bearers, both 
musicians, and both with badly wounded 
,arms. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 105 

At lunch time the Directress says she has 
been present at a terrible operation, "a 
joyeux Louis, with his buttocks blown off 
and horrible vital injuries." A picture of the 
gay cricket of the salle d'attente, who in his 
boyish bravado had made so light of his 
case, swims before my eyes. 

"Willhelive.?^" 

"He may, but in his condition I hardly 
dare to hope he will." 

5 P.M. 

A nice poilu who has fallen from his horse 
and broken his leg is brought in to us, and 
another with a shattered shoulder and a 
wound in the thigh. I first notice this 
man's delicate hands and feet. Then he 
speaks to me. He is a corporal, an en- 
gineer, graciously courteous, blue blood 
surging up here out of the true democracy of 
the French army. 

I am hardly back in my shack when — one, 
two, three — the shrill whistles electrify 
me again. Only one entrant. This time a 
bullet through the flesh above the knee. 



106 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

It looks a little inflamed, but nothing can 
be done to-night. He is a Breton farm hand, 
Le Couedie, thirty-four or so, a territorial, 
with an innocent rosy face and blue eyes. 
He seems dazed to find himself not only a 
soldier but wounded and so far from home. 
The salle d'attente is the most dramatic 
of all the scenes of action here, except per- 
haps the operating room. The men passing 
through the hands of the nurse in charge 
there, form with her, in that first hour of 
strangeness and helplessness, warm ties of 
sympathy which last through all their stay. 
Some are speechless and come in only to die. 
We often know nothing of them, or no 
more than a chance delirious word reveals. 
Their smothered romances die with them — 
thirty years or more with one wipe of the 
sponge. But life has many dimensions, and 
length is perhaps the least indispensable of 
them all. 

As Le Couedie is carried off to bed, an- 
other boy of Louis's battalion arrives. He 
looks at us suspiciously, insists on undress- 
ing himself, will not let us touch him. On 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 107 

the bed he stiffens himself and when I 
propose washing his back he says stub- 
bornly that I may cut that out. The 
orderly laughs: 

"He is afraid the die will run!" referring 
obliquely to his fantastically tattooed skin. 

At bay, he turns reluctantly on his side 
and uncovers a hard lump tightly tied up 
in a check handkerchief — his money, hidden, 
he had hoped, from our possible light- 
fingeredness ! 

11:30 p.m. 

Midnight mass. An empty ward has 
been turned into a chapel over Christmas. 
The Medecin-chef does not smile on the 
clergy, but his permission for this mass has 
been asked and given. Baron officiates 
with simple dignity. Tessac with his beau- 
tiful voice leads the singing. Doctors, 
nurses, orderlies, and some of the General's 
staff attend. The candle light from the 
improvised altar wavers dimly on their 
uniforms and on their faces. 



CHRISTMAS 

The glib Christmas salutation has a curious 
twist as it slips from our lips and awkwardly 
turns and corrects itself into a hope for next 
year. Each ward has its tree planted in a 
wooden tub. The convalescents and order- 
lies are keen on their decoration. Those of 
the blesses who are not too ill, while they 
banter one another over the contents of their 
"stockings," criticize the decorating of the 
tree. Rivalry runs high, and those who are 
up go from one ward to another for a peep — 
all things are allowed them to-day — and 
bring back news of the trees. Which one is 
likely to have the final vote.^^ 

The Penguin and I have taken great pains 
to divide the ornaments evenly, but there is 
latitude in their arrangement for a display 
of local talent. We have several wounded 
Arabs — one noseless, though light-hearted 
as ever; and a devoted pair — a sergeant and 

108 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 109 

'*Mouton'* as they call his friend and shad- 
ow. The sergeant is in bed, but Mouton 
is up and about. He lends a willing hand 
to the nurse and orderlies of his ward and 
even assists the barber in his varied activ- 




ities. In his little round cap and red 
flannel dressing gown he is ravished to be 
allowed to help with the arrangement of 
tinsel and coloured balls and to report to 
his ward on the progress of rival trees. It 
would be interesting to catch the angle from 
which they see our festival of peace and 
goodwill, that only this pitiless strife and 
our urgent need to pile up a strong and ever 



110 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

stronger protecting wall of flesh between us 
and our enemies have drawn them into 
sharing with us. They are childlike, smil- 
ing, polite, even grateful for the privilege 
of dying for us. Do we not too lightly 
heap responsibilities on our own shoulders .^^ 
What can our racy, feverish civilization of 
iron and steel, which so glitters in their eyes, 
give them in exchange for the silences and 
spaces, for the hand-to-hand grapple with 
Nature and one another, of their own free 
deserts .f^ 

The guns are pounding away, but our 
salle d'attente is happily empty all day. 
Mutilated youth— the shattered fragments 
of that pounding — does not come our 
way. 

At sundown the trees are lighted and 
make a brave show, with their strings 
of coloured paper lanterns festooned along 
the crossbeams of the shacks and with 
flags and red paper flowers made by the 
men who, for the last ten days, have been 
busy over them, enjoying the fun like a lot 
of happy children. The Golden Godmother 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 111 

goes the round of the wards distributing the 
presents which, tied with bright ribbons, 
have been piled into baskets. Many col- 
oured lights spread a warm glow over the 
whole enclosure, zigzagging across the pond 
in the wake of the ducks that are turned into 
red and green enamel set in translucent 
darkness. Pain for a moment is dazzled and 
slinks into the shadow. 

The General and some of his staflF come 
up to see the fete. He is uneasy. We glow 
the most conspicuous spot in the whole 
plain. 

"The next thing will be a bomb dropped 
in our field." 

He files an order that henceforth all 
shutters must be closed, and no shack show 
a light after dusk. 

We all have a real Christmas dinner, 
ending up with plum pudding and even 
champagne. Tessac sings carols, gay argot 
songs of the life of Paris, and ballads of the 
men's own countryside, while they swell the 
refrains. Consciousness brims over, pour- 
ing out to meet the hum of plucky voices 



112 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

raised in the trenches, ships, and hospitals 
of all our Christmas world. 

December 26. 

Louis of the criminal regiment is dying. 
The hospital, to me, calls him "your boy." 
His desperate gaiety cuts to the quick. The 
General has decorated him for that daring 
dash of his; could his slighted, improvident 
life more surely get even with its handicap? 
Yet I have wondered — do I grow cynical of 
decorations? The price, these young lives, 
and the dear, boyish recklessness of their 
inexperience, are distorting my values. But 
how else, in such an upheaval, can our short- 
reaching hands chalk up the record? He has 
suffered agony and begins to lose hold on his 
blithe good humour. Something of himself 
has already gone on, and he is growing ir- 
ritable under the terrible strain. Gangrene 
draws a denser and denser screen around 
him, slowly severing him from life. 

Christmas is over. The Directress and her 
maid have gone. My heart fails me as I 
reflect that I am left in charge. 



. A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 113 

*' Nothing but little things can happen, 
so do not worry. The old Medecin-chef 
and I have come mutually to understand 
and respect each other. Show him every 
consideration. Always ask his advice; he 
likes to be consulted. In case of complica- 
tions arising from the French side, turn for 
direction to Moral Influence and La Basine; 
on the Anglo-Saxon side, to the Night 
Hawk. But nothing can happen. Keep 
them all happy." 

My sailing orders were precise enough. 
I let myseK be lulled by the words and the 
peace of an after-Christmas fatigue falls on 
the Bolte. 

One of the nurses lends me some books, 
but it is difficult to find time here for reading 
or for letter-writing. We have plenty of 
spare moments, but so scattered that it 
takes a good deal of character to keep hold 
of any thread. Familiarity perhaps will 
help to lengthen the days. I am surprised 
to find how soon one grows accustomed to 
the sound of guns and to the continual 
arrival of the wounded. It is funny to see 



114 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

the new nurses, their eyes grow big the 
first time they feel their shacks vibrate. 
But before one knows it, the days have be- 
gun to seem almost monotonously natural. 
We should hardly have thought them so in 
the old civilian life, now separated from us 
by the abyss which has swallowed at a gulp 
the interests and occupations of a lifetime. 
This is a healthy life. Continual exercise, 
running in and out of the shacks in all 
weathers at all hours, their airiness, the 
simple food, sound war bread, good milk 
and eggs, all contribute to make it so. 
Every one is kind and helpful. French 
courtesy smooths away all difficulties for 
the novice. 




December 27. 8 p. m. 



"Eugene Sureau, 79th Territorials." 

That is all, written on a card over your 
bed and indelibly written also in my mem- 
ory. Why do I so remember you, Eugene 
Sureau? 

You came in the night when I was not 
even on duty. It did not fall to me to cut 
off the torn, blood-soaked clothes, to give 
you the first cheer, the first warmth, after 
the wet, cold, unthinkable trenches and the 
torturing journey over rough roads in a 
poorly hung ambulance where, in the dark, 
you must have lain silently shrinking under 
each fresh jolt, 

115 



116 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

It has snowed all night and all to-day — a 
fine, hard snow that sparkles on the little 
wooden ways spanning the mud between 
our shacks. It sparkles, too, on the high- 
sitting old windmill which, through so many 
sunsets, has turned, like Verhaeren's mill, 
on a sky couleur de lie. Even the colour of 
the lees of wine is not in the sky this evening 
when you find your place in my memory, 
Eugene Sureau. I did not see your wounds. 
Sometimes that gaping, indecent horror 
photographs itself on the mind. They told 
me you had come in torn by shrapnel; but 
that was true of so many others. 

Once or twice during the day, as I passed 
your bed, I smiled you a ''Commentallez-vous, 
mon amif and heard your patient "C^a 
ne va pas tres Men, ma sceur,'' When at white 
nightfall I turned into Salle IV, you were 
not in my mind, Eugene Sureau. I had 
forgotten the big stretcher bearer who lay so 
uncomplainingly in bed 6. The ward was 
darkened, and the day orderlies had gone off 
duty. Only the orderly whose watch held 
him there until midnight was noiselessly 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 117 

moving from bed to bed, preparing the men 
for their night of pain. But round bed 6 the 
sxireens were drawn, and, hearing me open 
the door, a nurse beckoned to me from a 
space between them. 

"He has just died. I am alone. Will 
you help me to lay him out?" 

There you were, the play of that patient 
smile still across your lips. The doctors 
had done what they could for you, but your 
wounds were too many and a terrible 
haemorrhage had left you too weak to bear 
more. Both your legs were bandaged from 
hip to heel. 

"Take the forceps out of that wound and 
put on layers of wool and more bandages," 
the nurse whispered. 

And as I obey and add to the deforming 
bandages wool and yet more wool, you seem 
so little dead, so warm, that with a shame- 
faced sense of intrusion I expect to see your 
eyes turn on me, or a look of pain tighten 
your lips. No muscle moves. We can do 
as we will with you. We cannot hurt you. 
You are warm, yet far away; you are warm, 



118 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

yet life — which your athlete's body and 
strong sweet face had perhaps made dear to 
you — ^has gone as capriciously, as myste- 
riously, as it came. Are you satisfied not to 
be, I vaguely wonder. Or is that quiet 
smile merely the tribute of the parting 
guest to his host — a well-bred acknowledg- 
ment of favours received, of discomforts too 
short-lived to be remembered .^^ 

We have wrapped you in your shroud, 
fastened the corner with its purple satin 
cross over your head. The nurse has 
stolen away through the hushed and now 
sleeping ward to call the stretcher bearers. 
I stand beside you, becoming compassion- 
ately more and more aware of the well-drawn 
lines of your body. Then suddenly I glance 
up and see the card over your bed: ''Eu- 
gene Sureau, 79th Territorials." What are 
you to me but a name, a fine line, a thrill 
at one more turn of the screw among so 
many others heroically borne? 

Yet from that moment you live for me. 
On some sunny countryside in France are 
your mother, your wife, your ^'gosses'' — 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 119 

playing at soldiers, perhaps, and talking of 
your home-coming. All unconscious are 
they that you lie here shrapnel-torn in this 
darkened sleeping ward, still warm but 
dead, while I, stooping down, give you, in 
their place, the kiss of peace which in the 
East the living give the dead. 

You have been dead since the beginning 
of the world, yet you are still warm, Eugene 
Sureau. Why does your name so echo in 
my memory .f^ What were you, Eugene 
Sureau .f^ 




THE DAILY ROUND 

December 28. 

There is a movement of troops in the village 
this morning. Beyond our hedge and behind 
the high windmill dark patches of little 
men, like ninepins, are hurrying to and fro. 
Ruled lines of them gyrate and are exor- 
cised into rectangular shapes. The word 
comes up that General Joffre is there deco- 
rating a battalion of joyeux from the front 
and another on its way to take their places. 
It would have been interesting to see the old 
lion, generalissimo of us all, but we did not 
know of it in time to get the necessary per- 
mits. So we strain our eyes to catch what 
we can of the ceremony from our own trot- 
toirs. 

Moral Influence, La Basine, the Chic 
Type, the old Medecin-chef , and the doctor 
in charge of the radiographic cabinet are 

120 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 121 

fast friends and almost form a little clique 
to themselves. Any two of them may often 
be seen walking up and down the narrow 
plank- walks, taking their exercise together. 

Moral Influence has a show ward. The 
walls are gay with coloured prints. • The 
linen room sets aside all the red bed-covers 
and red night shirts for her. She is open- 
handed and takes a pride in having the best 
of everything from spirit lamps to attitude 
of mind. She is not a trained nurse, but 
long practice in settlement work and expe- 
rience at the front since the beginning of the 
war have made her ready and capable. She 
appreciates and makes the most of the men's 
good qualities, and those in her ward who 
are well enough, put on — to please her — 
shining, happy faces. 

Tracheotomy has been performed this 
morning on one of her men. We all 
take turns at sitting by him and keeping 
warm compresses on his throat. He is 
restless, at moments violent, and can with 
diflaculty be kept in bed. Then he seems 
to struggle through to consciousness and 



122 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

becomes docile and apologetic. At such 
times Moral Influence pats his hand, " Cher 
hommey c'est un hrave,^ and turning her 
eyes away, "How admirable these men are!" 
while through his agitated gasping for 
breath he smiles up into her pleasant face. 

December 29. 

The report of yesterday is contradicted 
to-day. It was not General Joffre in the 
village, but **a British general decorating 
British troops." We are so isolated that 
the nearest fringe of the outer world barely 
grazes our hedge. 

3 P.M. 

We should all like to know how Etienne, 
who is the only son of well-to-do people in 
the Midi, fell into the Foreign Legion. He 
volunteers no light on his career, unless his 
name for his nurse — "Elsa" — ^repeated all 
through his delirium, may be taken as light. 
His father and sister have been to see him, 
and when I went into the ward this morning 
he offered me some anemones fresh from his 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 123 

home. No one would recognize my Tityus, 
the wild, suffering boy who came in such a 
short while ago. He puts his pannikin with 
a label on it by his bed to remind me, in 
case he should be asleep when I pass, to 
fill it with a special offering of cream or 
stewed fruit. The doctors say he cannot 
recover, but he seems slowly to be making 
his way toward what looks like health. 

December 30. 

The day has been eaten up chiefly by 
domestic considerations. Our household is 
simple enough. Our butler — ^nothing less — 
is in private life a house-painter, one of twins 
and of five mobilized brothers. He is young 
and shy with a high colour and an amusing, 
self-conscious, sideways walk. A little 
blue fatigue cap is stuck jauntily on one side 
of his head. His particular job is to keep 
the dining room and "salon" fires goings, 
the floors swept, the plates heated, and to 
balance himself along the narrow plank- walks 
from the dining room to the kitchen and 
tack with our rations. Also, with all the 



124 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

orderlies, to take his turn as night watch, 
which means sitting up for half a night one 
night in every three. At first he was 
seconded by a village priest, now promoted 
to the rank of orderly in one of the wards — 
a position he long coveted. The priest has 
been replaced by Charles Rablet, a farm 
hand at home. 

Now for Rablet I have an especial weak- 
ness. He is small, smiling, with a native 
humour, a frank, simple roughness, and a 
face that makes one think of apples and hay. 
His home is far away in the Vosges. When 
asked if he has any children, he answers in 
broad dialect, "Madame Charles has five of 
them." Letters tell him that Madame 
Charles has the grippe. Rablet cannot get 
permission to go home; he wails: "They are 
going to cup Madame Charles and I shall 
not be there." 

Then there is also Madame Bosecke, 
charwoman and plate-washer, who — like 
Madame Madeleine, our right hand — is a 
Belgian refugee. The plate washing and 
lamp cleaning are done in a little lean-to 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 125 

jocularly known as "The Castle of the 
Frozen Feet." Madame Bosecke is by no 
means destitute. She has a husband, four 
children, a horse and cart, and much else of 
her old home, which the others say she saved 
before taking refuge in our little village. 
Her morning fire lighting has at least the 
virtue of smoking us out. Her slovenly 
activities irritate Rablet who baits her con- 
tinually. He then looks round at any 
chance audience he may have, and smilingly 
remarks: "Women need to be broken in." 
In another walk of life one might suspect 
him of having read Nietzsche. Every after- 
noon when the coal carts arrive, the most 
knowing of the orderlies make a dash to 
get the biggest pieces for their own wards. 
At first Rablet was not up to this game. 
But after he found it out his sturdy figure 
might be seen any afternoon, toward three 
o'clock, lying in wait behind one of the 
shacks, a pail in each hand; and no fires in 
the Botte burned more clearly and brightly 
than ours. 

A solemn ceremony of our day is the 



126 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

morning potato peeling. The potatoes are 
spread out on a space between two shacks; 
twenty or more orderlies stand round in a 
.ring, peeling, peeling, joking, grumbling 
soUo voce, and peeling — it is amazing how 
many we make away with. At first I 
thought it must be a religious function of 
some sort that kept them so still with bowed 
heads. 

As the maid is on leave, I try to concoct a 
pudding for the nurses' dinner, for our ra- 
tions include pudding once a week only. 
It is badly burned. Milk puddings made 
on a narrow salon grate, too narrow for more 
than half the saucepan to sit on the fire at a 
time, burn too easily. I think of the ambi- 
tious Jap who took a place as cook, then sat 
up at night rehearsing and kept what he 
called a "cemetery" for failures. I find a 
spirit lamp and have better luck. 

In one of the shacks I come across some 
books and open Baudelaire's "Romantic 
Art." In this isolation it seems to me finer 
than ever. My eye falls on a phrase which 
rings in my head: "IZ etait passionnement 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 127 

epris de la passion.'' How soon the price- 
less thin edge of deep emotion blunts. No- 
where, as here, is one conscious of how fa- 
cilely one's values shift. 

I saw Louis yesterday for the last time. 
He died in the night. A boy with meningi- 
tis is dying, too; the strange characteristic 
cry sounds through his ward and reaches 
me, even here in my shack. 

December 31. 

One newcomer only, to-day; he also is of 
the Bataillon (TAfrique and has a broken 
arm. "What a piece of work for you, 
madame, to wash me; but how good it 
feels!" He gives me one of two rings he 
made in the trenches from the aluminium 
of his pannikin. ''The other is for my 
mother. If you offer to pay me I shall be 
hurt." I thank him and am delighted with 
my war trophy so graciously given — a 
genuine trench ring soon perhaps to take 
on some of the virtue of a curio. 

The General calls and tells me that 
twelve hundred British have been gassed — 



128 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

a new gas which does not have an imme- 
diate ejffect but causes forty-eight hours' 
agony. All the youth of my own family 
is not ten miles away, though letters be- 
tween us are six days on the road. We have 
one gassed French soldier. He will recover, 
but it is not pretty to see — nor reassuring. 

January 1, 1916. 

How gladly would we follow the custom 
of certain ancient peoples of Asia Minor and 
present this New Year with the dead head of 
the Old. The gorgon face of 1915, its 
eyes closed forever, would surely propitiate 
the most implacable deity. 

Ropes of evergreens and a plum pudding 
which came too late for our Christmas 
festivities are to celebrate the day. Baron 
hints that in the matter of the mass this 
morning we barely avoided a Franco- 
American pitfall. He is somewhat enig- 
matic, but he assures me that he took the 
only way mysteriously to save everybody's 
face. The result was une toute petite messe 
basse. So Tessac only sings a little — but 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 129 

very well. I rack my brains for a clue. 
Our Medecin-chef, we all know, is sharply 
anti-clerical. In response to a wish from 




the French nurses — ^possibly with the mobil- 
ized priests behind them — I had asked his 
permission for this New Year's celebration. 
Did M. Lussan think the screw was being 
turned on him by the priests, through me, 
whom he could not well refuse so small a 
favour without discourtesy? The whole 
strain between Church and State, in minia- 



130 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

ture, loomed maybe behind our little mass. 
And Baron — did lie know his actor best and 
with fine French flair score a victory, yet 
turn away wrath by so discreet a use of his 
privilege? How deep is the art of naviga- 
tion! 

We distribute coloured bags of sweets, 
knapsack needle-cases, and photo frames 
in the wards. The baker of the village 
sends us up big trays of cakes, as a New 
Year's offering to the men; the tobacconist 
sends cigarettes and packets of pipe tobacco 
all round. The unquenchable, witty light- 
heartedness of the French soldier rises to 
the occasion. No excuse for a f^te can be 
disregarded; so again we make merry. 

An aviator friend of Mademoiselle Basine 
takes a snap at us as he flies over the hos- 
pital. It is curiously decorative and suggests 
the artistic "arrangements" of a flying 
world in the New Years ahead. 



THE QUILL DRIVER 




January 8. 

A GREAT character of 
Salle II was" igP6^^^ 
PireJ' We called him 
so, partly out of affec- 
tion, partly because 
he was small and over forty and wore, drawn 
tightly over his head, a comic, crocheted, 
pink, pointed night-cap, with a tassel on the 
top; but chiefly, I think, because he had a 
young daughter of fourteen round whom his 
thoughts, when they did not dwell on his 
next meal, continually played. 

Seeing this rather pitiful little man in the 
last bed on his side of the ward, I went up 
to him and asked him if there was anything 
I could do for him. 

"Why, yes, madame," he answered in a 
voice that had in it an ancient note of 
complaint but was relatively to the mo- 

131 



132 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

ment cheerful to the point of heroism, "if 
you would get me a little comb I should be 
very grateful." 

"A little comb? Why, what would you 
do with it, mon vieux .^" 

He was lying there waiting to have a leg 
amputated and the request struck me as 
irrelevant. 

"Why, I would comb my moustache with 
it. Do you not see how much it needs it.^^" 

Between amusement and pity I was more 
than anxious to get him his comb. After 
a vain search through our hospital supplies, 
as luck would have it, when I was telling 
my story to amuse one of the tired nurses, 
she said : " There is a little comb in a leather 
case among some presents sent out for the 
Christmas trees. You will find it on the 
shelf in my room." 

Away I flew for the comb and back to Le 
Petit P^re who greeted me with a radiant 
smile. ' 

"Anything more you would like?" 

"I am ashamed to ask, but if I had a small 
notebook, it would make me very happy." 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 133 

The small notebook also was found and 
carried to him, and from that moment until 
he left the hospital we were, of course, boon 
companions. When he came round from 
the anaesthetic I must promise to be there, 
promise to hold his hand through the first 
most painful dressings when, since I must 
tell the whole truth, my protege would yell 
quite piteously, while others round him in 
the operating room — some with greater or- 
deals than his to be gone through, ordeals 
generally borne without a groan — would not 
unkindly chaff him : 

"Yell, yell, little father! It will do you 
good." 

And he: "Oh, but those blessed drains! 
Who will dare to say that they cause one no 
agony?" And, looking apologetically up 
at me, he would add: "Hold my hand tight 
and I will scream no more. But Oh, la, 1^, 
it does hurt." 

No one of all the silent spectators thought 
an iota the less of Petit Pere for his scream- 
ing. Every one could not be the same kind 
of hero. Had he not faced the music and 



134 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

lost a leg? And what of his Military Cross? 
Besides, his pink night-cap was in itself a 
passport to indulgence as was also his love 
for his little daughter. 

''Do not tell her they have taken off my 
leg. It will make her so unhappy. Tell 
her rather that her little father has an 
insignificant wound and will soon be with her 
on a long leave." 

Each day he showed me the notebook 
with its written side growing thicker and 
thicker. Such fine, neat handwriting. And 
from it he would invite me to read, while he, 
true to his role of author, would lick his lips 
over the happier phrases, accepting, as no 
more than his due, all words of praise. The 
diary, for so it really was, began with the 
minutest details of how he was wounded, 
how long he had lain on the field, how the 
stretcher bearers had found him and car- 
ried him away; of the drive in the ambulance; 
his reception in our waiting room, the hot 
scrub he had had there, with every particular 
of his first dressings, the character of each 
of his doctors and nurses, and his many 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 135 

small adventures right up to the gift of the 
comb, leaving it on record that he had only 
to ask to receive, in true biblical fashion. 

The story is nearly a counterpart of so 
many. The only amusing part of it is that, 
after several weeks, we discovered that he 
could not write a word himself, could not 
even sign his name, and that it was his 
comrade in the next bed who patiently put 
it all down for him. Of course, he was given 
the Medaille Militaire and his old Cross 
renewed the emotions of its youth under a 
falme. His past record and his lost leg 
were letters patent to that. But when we 
congratulated him, his face took on a woe- 
begone expression and his pals, after much 
suppressed giggling, confessed that he was 
afraid that he would die now, since a belief 
held that only the dying were ever decorated 
by the General. After that they would 
tease him and tell him how pale he looked; 
and the more jocose among them, better 
versed in the written word, would say 
his temperature was up to the dying point: 
he had better make haste and see a priest. 



136 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS ' 

He weathered the storm all the same, and 
finally the day came when we were obliged 
to send him on to a base hospital. 

'^ Good-bye, sister. You have been very 
good to me. I will often write to you." 

I smiled, knowing the secret and wonder- 
ing how it would be when he no longer had 
his neighbour to cover the pages for him with 
that careful, neat handwriting. I need not 
have worried at all. Could not Petit 
Pere with his moustache carefully combed 
and his flair for a good tale, find as many 
kind comrades as he could wish for.? Pres- 
ently his letters began to flow in — ^long 
sheets packed with closely written words. 
They reminded me of sixteenth-century 
Pontormo and his diary. Let Le Petit 
Pere speak in his own words, which cover 
the ground so felicitously, so unaffectedly, 
in their passion for revealing detail and their 
keen sense of life. 

"I hasten to write this letter to give you 
my news and receive yours by the same 
token. I got through the journey very well. 
I arrived at Dunkirk at eleven o'clock. At 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 137 

midday, bread-soup, meat, vegetables, and 
wine. At two o'clock, tea. At three o'clock, 
coffee, bread, and milk. At four o'clock, 
coupling-up of the Red Cross train. Finally, 
at five o'clock, the train took its departure 
and you may imagine how happy I was to be 
off in my compartment. I find myself, 
luckily, in the company of the joyeux from 
Salle III. The countryside is exquisite to 
see. Unfortunately the night comes too 
soon, and I can make out nothing more. 
At seven o'clock we find ourselves in the 
station at Calais, and for supper we are 
given meat, cheese, bread, wine, with coffee 
to finish up. We go on again at five o'clock 
the next morning, and are given bread-soup, 
black coffee, rolls, and butter. 

"The day begins to dawn and we perceive 
pretty green plains. It is a beautiful sight. 
It refreshes me after the muddy swamps of 
Belgium. At the station of Rouen the 
morning meal is passed round: broth, ham, 
boiled eggs, jam, cigarettes, and oranges. 
We leave that station at midday. We cross 
the Seine from which a thick mist rises." 



138 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

And so through many pages of notes on the 
long journey. 

A later letter, less well written (Was he 
by that time separated from the joyeux 
of Salle III?) runs: "I have arrived at Le 
Havre. I have not suffered and have been 
well fed. At the hospital where I now am I 
must undergo another operation. May it 
be the last! I am on a low diet, but 
what they give me is good. I am very 
much troubled, but not on account of my 
leg. I have received bad news from home. 
My poor old mother is dead. You may 
imagine, madame, how great a pain this 
is to me. I think the news of the loss of 
my leg added to her great age must have 
caused her death. ... I continue to 
write every day in my notebook. I think, 
dear madame, this is all I have to tell you 
to-day. Send me, of your kindness, a 
packet of Bastos; I cannot get them here. 
I will send you the money for them." 

Poor little father! Sincerest and most 
unpretentious of quill drivers by proxy. 




HOW THEY LEAVE US 



January 12. 

Twice a week the blesses are sent on to 
the base hospitals. I have to be up in the 
dim morning to see that everything is ready 
in the salle d'attente. ''Evacuation Days" 
are busy ones for me. Sometimes we send 
off as many as thirty-six in a batch, some- 
times only two or three, but an effort is 
made to keep the hospital empty, for we 
never know when a rush may come. 

When there are many evacues one of our 
chief difficulties is to get enough water 
for the hot bottles. The head of the 
wash-house looks glum at any pilfer- 
ing in his cauldrons, and the stretcher 
bearers, who keep the water going for the 

139 



140 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

operating room, jealously guard theirs. 
We have recently, outside the salle d'attente, 
acquired a cauldron of our own, but in 
the intervals of our need the orderlies let 
the fire go out. The Penguin, who says 
that since he never sleeps he will be garde 
perpetuel of the waiting room, appears to 
have much-needed moments of oblivion, 
for too often, early on cold winter mornings, 
there is the same old harassed scramble for 
hot water. 

We are going to make a new arrange- 
ment. The night nurses will undertake 
to jog the memory of the ''perpetual guard" 
of the waiting room on their four-o'clock 
and five-o'clock morning rounds. But this 
hot-water question is still of burning im- 
portance. The wounded, taken out of bed 
and dressed, are brought to the salle d'at- 
tente on stretchers. Each man must be 
warmly wrapped up in blankets with one or 
more hot-water bottles, for he has a long and 
cold journey before him. Safely tucked up, 
he signs a receipt, and his valuables are re- 
turned to him. The Directress gives choco- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 141 

late and cigarettes all round to beguile the 
way. The men, looking Hke mummies, are 
then hoisted into the ambulances to cries of: 
^'He la ! Gare a la tete, au pied, au bras'" — 
and away they go. 

They all long to be sent to Paris, and 
anxiously ask: 

" Where am I going .^^ " To which the stale 
joking answer is: 

"Origin and destination unknown." 

"Good-bye, and thank you, sister." 

"Good-bye, friend, and good luck to 
you!" 

One gets so attached to them, it is often 
hard to see them disappear into the silence 
out of which they came. 

My friend, the joyeux who gave me the 
ring, has had his arm set and was sent off 
to-day. 



THE FOLK SONG 

January 15. 

I WENT this evening to say good-night to 
the men in Salle II and give them an evening 
cigarette — a "Bastos," which they prefer 
to all others good or bad. Even the lure of a 
"Woodbine" pales beside this brand of their 
desire. I find le pere Corneiller on his even- 
ing round, and he asks me to help him with 
the dressings. Le Couedic has had a bad 
time with his knee. It seemed nothing at 
first but, after two operations, the articula- 
tion of the knee had to be opened. With 
a forceps I hold the desolate flap while the 
pus is cleaned away and disinfectants poured 
on the wound. He is better to-night. 
Frangois — *'poor little number 1," as we 
call him — is better, too. For many days 
we have had to be very quiet on his ac- 
count. After the doctor goes I say: 

142 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 143 



*' Would you like Tessac to sing to you 
to-morrow?" 

*' Yes, but we have a tenor of our own, Le 
Couedic, there in the fourth bed. Ask him, 
madame. He would like to sing to you." 

Without overmuch persuasion their tenor 
agrees. He is propped up against his bed- 
rest, looks round his audience with his out- 
of-doors blue 
eyes, wavers 
a trifle in 
striking his 
note, and be- 
gins a Breton 
popular song 
in a sweet, 
rather plain- 
tive voice. 

It is dusk, and there is no other sound 
while he sings and sings and sings. I look 
on in amazement. Is this the bashful farm 
hand, so absorbed, so enjoying his own 
art.f^ 

It is bedtime for them, and their nurse 
has been all too indulgent. After the 




144 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

twentieth verse I say: *'That is very nice, 
but you must not get too tired, cher ami /'* 
He lets himself be tucked up for the night 
and then, as I turn to go: 

"If you really like that, madame, I will 
finish It to-morrow." 

In a few minutes he is asleep. 

January 19. 

This morning two young joyeux are 
brought in. One of them is so clever with 
his hands. His pockets are full of long, 
intricate chains, bags, purses, and medallion 
frames made — in the boring lulls of the 
trenches — out of horsehair strung with steel 
beads. 

His friend, to whom he seems devoted, is 
in a desperate Condition. He is a southern- 
looking boy with a high colour under a 
smooth brown skin, and the large, almond- 
shaped dark eyes of an adolescent in a 
Persian miniature. It is a bad case of gas 
gangrene, and the doctors pass the fatal 
verdict: ''Faut te couper la jamheJ^ He 
refuses at first, then consents; it is his only 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 145 

thread of chance. De Precy amputates the 
leg at the hip joint, a staggering operation. 
The beauty of the mutilated body lying on 
the table and the severed leg carried away 
to be dissected is almost intolerable. 

Later, 

He is still alive but very restless. I 
meet Pere Corneiller coming from the ward 
and ask for news. He shakes his head : 

*'We were too late." 



THE "LIGHT BREEZE" 




January 20. 

When I arrived he was 
already one of the pets of 
the hospital and the pride 
of the doctors — not because 
of any show of health he 
made, poor lamb, but 
because he was still alive 
after all they had been allowed to do to 
him, and out of gratitude to him for all they 
thought they had learned to do against 
another time. 

As a little boy he had been an acrobat, 
and his delicate grown-up boniness still 
gave one some idea of what that reedy child- 
hood must have been. Then, weary of that 
hard life, or kicked out of the company for 
some slip, he became a waiter in a cafe. 
Never very communicative, he was as silent 

146 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 147 

on that score as on others. We can only 
infer that something learned there or before 
led him to commit le crime — ever so little a 
one perhaps, such as many we know may 
have committed. Only, you see, he was so 
thin in body and environment, there was 
nothing with which to cover it up; while 
others less exposed, well padded with for- 
tune and with place, sail virtuously on their 
ways all unsuspected. This crime then — 
he, as I have said, having nothing with 
which to hide it — lay not only naturally 
bare, but was dragged into a glittering 
artificial light by those whose interest it 
may have been to blacken and defame him 
and so gain another soldier for the not-too- 
popular African Light Infantry. 

He was condemned, of course, and 
*' poured" (as they so forcibly say) into the 
Bataillon (TAfrique to be a zephyr or joyeux 
then and until his death. Brave boys, 
many of these joyeux are. Their crimes for- 
gotten when the war bugles blow, they are 
sent to the hottest corners; for, having 
nothing to lose but a trifling something of 



148 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

physical enjoyment and, perhaps, of physi- 
cal comfort, they fight with a daring and a 
foolhardiness born of their adventurous, 
irresponsible lives. Their zealous light- 
heartedness wins for them their name; and, 
if good fighters, they are no less heroes under 
suffering as many of us happen to know. 

There is always, of course, a chance of 
rehabilitation dangled before the eyes of any 
one of them who, more desperate than the 
rest, shall win a military laurel by some 
signal deed of daring. Once the cross or 
medal is pinned on his breast he can, if still 
whole, be "poured" into a regiment of 
better social repute, whitewash his black- 
ened name, and salve the old family sore 
that his backsliding may have caused. 
But, as one boy explained to me, the grapes 
so gathered too often turn sour in the eating. 
It is sujQScient for a theft or some unfathered 
act of insubordination to be committed in his 
new surroundings : presto, it is the erstwhile 
joyeux who is guilty. 

Why go any further? We have all 
heard of the dog and his name. The 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 149 

joyeux, even with his Cross of Honour, 
bought at a so much higher price than other 
people's crosses, generally prefers to remain 
in his own battalion, where there is honour 
even among thieves. 

Our Le Groux then, "Light Breeze" or 
** Joyous One" — a bullet through the spleen 
and kidney, half -flayed, with stomach, liver, 
and part of his intestines laid impudically 
bare, drains in the abdominal cavity and in 
his back — was one of the pets of the hospital 
and of the medical staff. If the doctors 
cherished him and cherished themselves in 
him, he no less cherished the doctors — one 
especially, M. Che vert, whose fine figure 
was physically all that Le Groux's was not. 
To real skill he added ''the happy hand," 
so dear to these suffering men, and was in 
return adored by them. 

''Monsieur le major est un chic type,^^ 
Le Groux would say; and a happy look of 
confidence would flit across the emaciated 
face, lighting into significance the bright 
brown eyes, high, hectic cheek bones, and 
somewhat oblique, thin nose. 



150 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

Every one spoke of Le Groux and asked, 
after each dressing, how he was; glanced 
many times a day at the chart over his bed 
and speculated what he would be fit for 
when — rehabilitated by a decoration (of 
which even a whisper would send his 
temperature speeding up to danger-point) 
and his wounds finally drained and cleaned 
— he should be handed on by us to a base 
hospital thence to mingle once more in his 
country's civil life. The gray hospital 
ambulance, with its prominent red cross, 
never whirled one of us into the nearest 
town, there to buy provisions and other 
household necessities, without bringing back 
some dainty for Le Groux — oysters, fish, 
petits gdteauXy or fruit — in the hope of 
tempting his capricious appetite and winning 
for ourselves his thanks. 

Yes, certainly he was one of the pets of the 
hospital. And not only did he adore his 
doctor, but he also adored his faithful 
friend the nurse — his nurse, the Night 
Hawk — to whom alone, by virtue of her skill 
and devotion, was entrusted the ceremony 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 151 

of his terrible dressings, and whose care 
came nearer to a true mother's than any- 
thing this boy had ever known. And yet 
his mother Uved. How we found it out I do 
not know. That was one of the things that 
always set us thinking. At rare intervals 
he would mention a sister, but never had 
any one of us heard him speak of his 
mother. Did he know her ashamed and 
broken-hearted by that slip, that blot, that 
crime, by reason of which he was "poured'' 
into the Bataillon d'Afrique.^ We shall 
never know. 

Here, then, you have his life with us, the 
slow-dragging days coloured only by his 
changing moods, mixture alike of fineness 
and coarseness, at moments pulling one up 
short with a sense of one's own inferiority, 
then again flashing too crude a light on that 
past of which we guessed so much and knew 
so little. 

Yesterday he had been here four months 
when — by one of those brusque changes, 
common I am told in all military hospitals 
(due, some say, to intrigue, others to a 



152 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

legitimate desire on the part of a paternal 
General Staff to give to all medical aspirants 
an equal chance of experience and prac- 
tice at the front) — the General signed the 
papers and our medical staff was changed, 
the Chic Type among the number. "Pro- 
motion" the authorities called it, though he 
thought otherwise; and there was much 
heartburning and putting of heads together 
in our camp. 

When Le Groux heard that his doctor was 
to go to another hospital he said brightly : 

'"Eh bien, you will wrap me up well and 
take me with you." 

"Alas, no, mon vieux, you must wait until 
that bronchitis is better; then I myself will 
come and fetch you. Au revoir et sois 
sage. You will, I hope, soon be well. The 
new doctor will be good to you." 

Le Groux lay still all that day and all 
the next. In the evening of the second day 
I stood looking down at his wan, pinched 
face, with the skin tightening round nose and 
lips. He slowly opened his eyes. 

"Is there nothing I can get for you? No.^^ 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 153 

Not even prunes ? ' ' They were his favourite 
sweet. 

"Things stick in my throat these days," 
he whispered, **but if you will cook them, 
to please you I will try to eat them." 

A moment later he stretched out his hands 
to his nurse who folded him in her arms, her 
hot tears falling on the white face. 

Twenty minutes later the General fol- 
lowed by the chief surgeon of the auto-chir 
turned the handle of Salle I. The General 
held a Croix de Guerre and a Medaille 
Militaire in his hand. 

"Where is Le Groux, ma sceur ?'* 

"He is dead." 

"Dead!" 

"Yes, he lived only on his courage. When 
they removed his doctor he lost hope 
and died." 

Without a word, his head 
bent, the General turned 
and left the ward, two little 
unopened boxes in his hand, 
his sheathed sword hang- 
ing impotently at his side. 




SQUALLS 

January 21. 

Sunday. It is a high, bright cold day. I 
go to the Medecin-chef with the bill of 
lading and plans, which arrived last night, 
of the new heating apparatus for the 
operating room. He is sitting rather de- 
jectedly in his overheated cabin sorting 
papers at a table. But affably : 

"Take a seat, madame." 

I explain my errand. 

"Very well. I am going away to-day, 
but I will see that it is attended to." 

The words are so lightly, smilingly spoken, 
that I take it as a temporary absence and 
attach no importance to the interview. He 
keeps the papers and I go serenely through 
the morning's routine. 

At lunch time, when I reach the dining 
room. La Basine, Moral Influence, and 

154 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 155 

Night ' Hawk are talking, with grave 
faces. 

"Is anything wrong?" 

"Yes, everything is wrong. Even the 
medecin-chef is going and the staff of 
the auto-chir is to step into our doctors' 
shoes. They would like us to believe that it 
is the doing of the Administration," and 
Moral Influence's eyes blaze. "It is quite 
true that administrations do not usually 
leave a laparotomist where laparotomy has 
most urgently to be performed, and Che- 
vert's record could hardly pass unnoticed," 
she continues scathingly. "But do not let 
them deceive you. The auto-chir is out for 
stripes, and, as every one knows, we have 
the best place on the front!" 

Night Hawk and I look despairingly at 
each other. Is it impossible that the 
change should be a mere matter of adminis- 
tration on the part of the Service de Sante.^* 
The French women brush aside the sugges- 
tion. Only strangers could be hoodwinked. 
What then had better be done.f^ Clever 
speech falls off clever, caustic tongues, and 



156 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

there is much restless consulting of our 
pillows, but nothing can be done. The 
spirit of the hospital turns like a harassed 
squirrel in its cage and can run up no tree 
to clear its vision. The nurses redouble 
their devotion. Let the truth about the 
doctors be what it may, the men shall not 
suffer by the change if they can help it. 

Organization 

January 23. 

Mademoiselle Basine has a mother. It 
is understood that every three months she 
visits her mother. The time draws near. 

Mrs. Grenville leaves her happy home. 
She has been here before and will return 
for a few weeks to fill the gap during La 
Basine's absence. She is big and breezy. 

"Efficiency, yes, that's the thing," she 
buoyantly sums it up. "If you will only 
wait a moment until I can have a morning 
at my desk, we shall become the most effi- 
cient hospital on the line. It's bully, you'll 
see. We do it at home and it works beauti- 
fully." 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 157 

She is almost cubistic in her dire simpHfi- 
cations. When she is not harassed by the 
tortuous complexities of other people's 
minds — of latin minds in particular — she 
has the pleasantest ways and a witty good- 
fellowship which plays seductively over her 
relentless absolutism. She adores uniform- 
ity and in all that does not touch America, 
she is pacifist and neutral to the backbone, 
though not without a weakness for politics. 
A fully trained and excellent nurse, she yet 
has done with nursing. She is not here now 
to probe physical weakness but to cut 
deeper — ^for the purification of art and sen- 
timent — down to the unquestionable de- 
pravity of the human heart. 

Once accomplish this satisfactorily, and a 
riddle which has come to puzzle her will be 
as simple as everything else. Perhaps her 
matured method, so free from any human 
deviation, has almost reached beyond the 
ripeness of a nice equilibrium. A little 
more, and might we not have a curious 
clinical example of a disease of labour? 
But that little more — ^how kindly Nature 



158 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

readjusts her balance. Just in time a tan- 
talizing flutter of the eyelids of Art dis- 
tracts her, piques her curiosity. Eyelids 
hitherto have been negligible. They com- 
fortably close at night and open in the 
morning, so call for no attention. Her 
common sense suggests that a good square 
look into the huzzy's eyes can reveal no 
more than naked truth, and does not ''Or- 
ganization" — ^for so, through this brief 
phase of her career, let us call her — ^know, 
from past experience, that there is nothing 
so simple as truth and that it is always ugly. 
Exceptions are too rare to call for pigeon 
holes. " Come, old lady, raise your eyelids; 
it is absurd to flutter them when you have 
only age and ugliness to hide." Yet the 
ancient eyelids coyly resist her blandish- 
ments. "Well, no matter, the way is 
easy. I will seek truth and find art." 
Like a vacuum cleaner she makes one buzz- 
ing round, then settles down to choose from 
her bag — out of the dust kicked up by hos- 
pital feet — the essential ingredients for 
analysis not only of love, heroism, and de- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 159 

votion with their thousand many-coloured 
facets, but of all other secrets — even to those 
underlying the French nurses' dissatis- 
faction with the late change of doctors. 

Logically given form what a hit the real 
truth will make. Great plans must not be 
confused by defiant feminine eyelids, how- 
ever august. So Organization clears her 
decks for action, while she turns and turns 
the chewing gum of her inquiry. 



A BLOW BELOW THE BELT 

January 28. 

We were driven into Dunkirk yesterday 
by M. Maline. At home he has all that 
wealth can give. Here he fills the humble 
role of chauflfeur to the auto-chir. He de- 
lights in burning up the road. Our com- 
missions done and an early moon beaming 
down upon us, we were skimming along the 
edge of the canal when we met a horse and 
shay with two occupants — an old man and his 
daughter — dawdling along. M. Maline ran 
the space between us too close, caught their 
axle with our mud-guard, and over they 
went into the ditch, breaking one of their 
shafts. It took us a few seconds to pull 
up and shake ourselves. A crumpled mud- 
guard was our only hurt. But what of the 
others? The old driver had picked himself 
up and was trying to quiet the plimging 

160 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 161 

horse, while his daughter lay back still 
dazed in the hood of the up-tilted shay. She 
soon clambered down, however, and running 
up to us, began to vociferate, pouring out a 
stream of noisy abuse in which the old man 
leading his horse joined querulously. 

We were sorry for the mishap and very 
anxious to make good. At the height of her 
harangue, the lady's eye fell on an English- 
man of our party. Had they not crossed 
the Channel together a couple of months 
ago? The sudden change in her manner at 
this discovery did honour to the memory 
of that encounter. She had since then had 
no chance of speaking English and, for- 
getting her wrongs, was just beginning to 
make up for lost time, when to our undoing 
the motor of M. Muret, our Medecin-in- 
specteur, came tearing along the road. 
Inspecteurs, I suppose, may never leave 
anything uninspected, least of all interest- 
ingly frayed edges of a newly broken shaft 
by the roadside. So before we knew it, he 
and his companion had joined our group — 
eight explanatory people with a shabby 



162 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

horse and an overturned shay behind us as 
our setting. Above all our voices rose the 
authoritative voice of M. Muret. 

"You admit, M. Maline, that it was your 
fault; you admit that you were speeding?" 
And the incriminating notebook, devoted 
to human stumblings — raw material for 
enquetes — was whipped from his pocket. 
Then his clockwork running down, he got 
back into his car and was off — ^who dares 
say at top speed .f^ 

We tether the horse by the road and take 
the lady— now mollified and as graciously 
talkative in English as she had before been 
vituperative in Flemish — into the limousine. 
Her father climbs into the vacant seat out- 
side and we drive them to their village for 
help. On the doorstep of her home the lady 
explains their mishap to her husband and 
points out the Englishman. The husband's 
face relaxes. Her old father sets forth the 
adventure to his old wife, who, in turn, 
gesticulating, tells the tale to all the vil- 
lagers within earshot. We leave our names, 
promise to replace the shaft, and shake 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 163 

hands all round with warmly expressed 
hopes of future and less dramatic meetings. 
We have formed imperishable ties. On our 
way home I say to M. Maline: 

"Well, we got out of that scrape simply 
enough. How easy it is for decent people 
to settle their differences." 

"Precisely so" — ironically — "but, ma- 
dame, have you not forgotten the Adminis- 
tration? The nudge we gave that body be- 
low the belt will cost me ten days at least 
of military prison." 




NIGHT DUTY 

February %, 

Neither the Night Hawk nor I could ever 
understand the disUke of the nursing staff of 
being put on night duty. So when a merci- 
ful spin of the executive wheel singled us out 
for the honour, there were perhaps no two 
such happy people in the Botte. 

Night is nowhere more wonderful than 
here. The daylight supremacy of vociferat- 
ing guns shrinks into a corner in tiie im- 
mensity of its ancient stillness. We are 
tired of the glare and tumult of the day; of 
conflicting personal interests; of interna- 
tional differences that have a way of oozing 
out of every heated pore. Simple, straight- 
forward work lightens and liberates. Only 
the tournament of smiles and frowns, so 
independent of the work on which our hearts 
are set, strains and wearies one. 

164 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 165 

The Night Hawk loves poetry and quiet. 
She is Canadian and of the gold one bends 
in one's hand, out of which primitive peoples 
fashion their ornaments and their gods. 
She is all disinterestedness, all devotion 
and self-forgetfulness; a thoroughly trained 
nurse with a heart that never loses the fresh- 
ness of its sympathy nor its willingness to 
be spent in the service of these men whose 
pluck is so amazing, whose rare lack of it, so 
pitiful. I have the happiest time in the 
world flitting through the night at her heels, 
resting for a moment to admire the ducks 
as they sleep upon the pond and reach, in the 
quality of their white under moonlight on 
gray-green water, the subtlety of premedi- 
tated beauty. 

We carry our lanterns flickering over mud 
and snow and put them down at the door 
of each ward we visit, that the orderly on 
guard in the salle d'attente may, in event of 
newcomers, know where to find us. In 
each ward an orderly is on duty. He sits 
reading at the table just inside the door, and 
it is his business to report to the nurses in 



166 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

any crisis. When the war broke out most of 
these men knew nothing of nursing. They 
are priests, barbers, farm hands, or small 
tradesmen, as the case may be, and have 
fitted themselves to fill their present billets 
droUy or effectively, according to their 
individual temperaments. Being of the 
same class as the soldiers, they have at 
least the advantage of thoroughly under- 
standing most of their charges. Their watch 
begins at dusk and lasts till midnight, when 
each is relieved by another orderly, on 
guard till all eyes open to the sound of the 
morning horn and the regular day staff 
takes the work again into its own hands. 

The night nurses make the little salon 
shack their headquarters. They build a 
bright coal fire, spread out on a table ma- 
terials for writing, reading, and for supper, 
and take undisputed possession of the night. 
It is part of their duty to be on call for the 
arrival of the ambulances and to go the round 
of the hospital once every hour, unless 
particular circumstances make it necessary 
for one of them to spend the whole night at 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 167 

some forlorn bedside or to renew a dressing 
which cannot be left so many hours un- 
changed. 

At the midnight return "home," if there 
has been a moment for forethought, there 
will be not only a cheering glow, but a kitten 
and a kettle singing their welcome together 
and an hour of conscious rest such as no day 
can ever know. 

And the night nurse often needs such 
simple cheer. While on her rounds she 
glides through darkened ward after dark- 
ened ward. Death — mysterious, spasmodic 
breathing-out of life which our instinct 
so curiously shrinks from — is here, is there, 
is everywhere. The beautifying touch of 
his obliterating finger disarms her fear. 
It is not so with pain, in whose wry, haunted 
environment is neither life nor death, but a 
grimly barriered and bounded No Man's 
Land where the bravest lose their bearings. 
No intimacy lessens her horror of his pres- 
ence. He alone seems the great reality, and 
life no more than a drop of water, detained 
and magnified for a moment out of relativ- 



168 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

ity, then slipping eagerly from under his 
distorting lens back into the churning 
current. 

There are uneventful nights, too, when 
the men snore loudly, there is hardly a groan, 
and no newcomer. At such times we tiptoe 
in and out of the wards, putting a cigarette 
into a wakeful hand and telling its owner on 
how many rounds we have found him fast 
asleep. Hours drag in darkened wards. 
Fever and delirium do not quicken their 
pace, and the blesse, with the rest of the 
world and with greater reason, has an in- 
stinct for exaggerating the tale of his sleep- 
lessness. 

On such nights we are keenly alive to the 
dire import of the blaring guns on the one 
hand and, on the other, to the sleeping still- 
ness of half a hemisphere where busy minds 
forget their arithmetic and predatory hands 
for a moment lie inert. 

During the day the night nurses sleep in a 
tent, pitched for quiet in the middle of a 
field outside the hospital enclosure. It is a 
small green tent with two beds, a tiny table. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 169 

and two oil stoves to take off the chill. To 
reach it we climb through a hole in the hedge 
and balance ourselves on a slippery plank — - 
laid precariously across the ditch, and which 
under our weight generally slips into the slime 
— then across a space thickly set with thistles. 
This field the night nurses once shared with 




a cow, until the cow became too curiously 
enamoured of the tent and had to be 
evicted. 

Some mornings the tent strains and pulls 
at its moorings and groans as the wind 
licks furiously around it, until we can al- 
most imagine ourselves the centre of a whirl- 
wind, instantly to be caught up in its spiral. 



170 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 



At quieter times as we lie courting sleep 
and lazily looking out across the beautiful 
grass, powdered and glistening with hoar 
frost, our eyes can rest on a cottage, thatch- 
roofed and nestling close behind the hedge, 
or play along the main road not fifty yards 
away, where silhouettes of soldiers pass con- 
tinuously in single file trudging to and from 
the front. 

At six p. M. Madame Madeleine wakes us, 
a cup of tea in her hand. The horn will 

sound for la soupe at 
seven, and duty begins 
again at eight. 

The horn is blown by an 
old man who has in his 
hands the regular running 
of the Bolte. He begins 
at six-thirty every morn- 
ing and points the day 
with his blasts. The rest 
of his job is to pick up 
all stray paper lying about 
within our circle. He sportingly awaits his 
moment and spears fluttering scraps on an 




A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 171 

old two-pronged fork fastened to the end of 
a long stick. 

February 3. 

The auto-chir tightly closes its fist over 
the possession of its prospective stripes. 
Three months to face — the Chic Type's 
record will easily cover that, his friends 
ironically insist — and its reward is sure. 
Steadily making its way through the cross 
currents the work of the hospital goes on as 
usual. Entrants, evacues, nimble scalpels 
cutting their way through cries of pain — 
life, death, and rival factions rolling over 
in their tussle to be top dog. 

A large school of surgeons or stagiaires 
is billeted on us. They are of all ages and all 
grades. The operating room has become a 
school for demonstration presided over by 
De Precy who at least brings an excellent 
surgical record in support of his new ap- 
pointment. 



THE BLUE FACE 

In the Operating Room 

Eleven p. m. The whistle sounds three 
times. Six newcomers. 

"This leg is bleeding badly. Don't jolt 
him. Take him carefully to the operating 
room. Hurry." 

" Your wound is in the head, I see. Doc- 
tor, to which ward shall he go?" 

172 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 173 

*'Wash and warm him. Then let them 
take him to Salle III. It is Nourier's 
turn to-morrow. He will operate." 

"And this one, ma soeur?" 

"A bullet in the abdomen; hardly any 
pulse and he has been vomiting." 

"When was he wounded .^^ Twenty-four 
hours ago? It is a scandal ! We must oper- 
ate at once. You say that none of them 
have had anti-tetanus serum? What crim- 
inal neglect ! An inquiry must be set afoot. 
Such things cannot be allowed to pass. 
Where is he from?" 

"From Bosinghe." 

"Our section. How can they expect us to 
save them if they keep them so long before 
sending them on? WTiat with poisoned am- 
munition and exposure, the odds are all 
against them." 

"This man, doctor, is wounded in the 
neck. His card says the bullet went through 
the neck and is probably lodged in the base 
of the skull or in the spine." 

"When was your last dressing done, mon 
ami ? I can hardly hear what you say — 



174 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

two hours ago? Two? (Holding up two 
fingers.) You have come all the way with 
your head over the end of the stretcher 
like that? I see, you could not breathe 
with it otherwise? Get him warm, sister, 
and send him to the operating room. Then 
we will see." 

How terrifyingly blue his face is! Such 
a nice face, too. He has hardly any 
pulse. 

**Here, my friend, let me put this cushion 
under your head and raise it just a little. 
And the hot-water bottles will soon make 
you feel better. Thank you for that smile." 

All bad cases to-night. 

In the operating room the boy with a 
bullet in the abdomen lies on his stretcher 
on the floor, apparently dead. They do all 
they can to bring him round. He revives. 
They chloroform him, open the abdominal 
cavity. Floods of dark blood well out. 
We are too late. 

"If they could only send us these abdom- 
inal cases at once. A fine, handsome young 
chap like that, too 1 " 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 175 

" Yes, appalling ! It's war. Now for that 
leg; it cannot wait." 

February 4. 

"There is to be a big operation this morn- 
ing. Have you heard?" 

"Which.? The head?" 

"No, that spinal case. It will be inter- 
esting. Who is to do it?" 

"I do not know but I hope De Precy. 
These men are like children; they give 
themselves over to one so trustingly. The 
best is not good enough for them, poor 
devils." 

The whole medical staff is in the theatre 
with the matron, two nurses, and myself — 
come together at the invitation of the 
Medecin-chef to see so rare a tour de force in 
surgery. The fair man brought in during 
the night lies on the table alone. He is 
naked, a blanket lightly thrown over him. 
Every one is busy — sterilizing instruments, 
getting swabs, towels, and dressings ready 
or talking in little hushed groups. 



176 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

What is he thinking of, I wonder. I go 
up to him. 

*'You look a different person this morn- 
ing, mon vieux. How do you feel.^^" 

"Better, thank you. You are the nurse 
of the waiting room." 

"So you remember me.f^ I feel flattered. 
Where is your home.^^ In Nantes you say? 
And you have four little children.? Lucky 
man." 

"Yes, they are not bad. All but the 
youngest go to school. And she's a 
harum-scarum. If I could only see them 
now." 

"Every one will do what he can to make 
it possible. Courage! No need for me to 
say that to you, mon brave J^ 

''Eh bien, are we ready? What is his 
pulse?" 

"Sixty-eight." 

"So much to the good. He had none 
when he arrived. Is he off? Turn him on 
his face." 

"The pulse is gone!'' 

"What? Quick! Put him on his back 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 177 

again. Stimulate him. Caffeine. . . . 
Ah, he comes round. That was a nasty 
turn to play us. Is he all right now? Then 
lay him on his side. And you, Berry, never 
let go of his pulse even for a second. We 
must keep him in this position. Prop him 
up — yes, so. It makes it harder, but it 
cannot be helped. Where is that radio- 
graphic plate .^ Let me have another look 
at it. Not so successful, Gougon, as some 
you have made. No sign of the ball.^^" 

"None that I can definitely make out." 

"There is a slight thickness just here, I 
think. And from the symptoms it seems 
to me that the projectile might well be there. 
Are you not of my opinion, Samain.f^" 

"Possibly, Medecin-chef. It looks al- 
most like it," 

"Very well then, messieurs, I will mark 
that spot on the neck with a blue pencil. 
I shall make an incision from the third to the 
sixth cervical vertebrae and I think that 
we shall find the baU. You are keeping a 
careful watch on the pulse. Berry? Good. 
And you, hold his neck as level as possible 



178 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

to give him the best chance of breathing. 
Now we begin. Can you all see.? You? 
And you, mesdames?" 

All heads lean forward. The shorter and 
less well placed politely elbow the others 
and watch their chance to push forward, 
while others, finding it hopeless to see well 
enough to follow the operation with any 
profit, lean up against the wall, waiting. 
One or two look out of the window across 
the little pond with its well-spaced old wil- 
low trees and its fat, lazy ducks — across to 
the mud flats of Flanders, here and there 
dotted with windmills, faint and fainter 
reflections of our own which turns and turns 
always, marking indecipherable cycles of 
life and death upon the sky. 

"Come here, madame. I want to show 
you the spinal cord compressed by broken 
bone, but apparently uninjured. See, I 
take out the splinters. Ah, here is the 
flattened piece of lead just as I hoped. 
Voila, that is all I dare do. What do you 
say? 'A horrible operation; a gash deep 
like a trench cored with the marrow of life'? 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 179 

You are right. To see the living spine is 
not an every-day occurrence. But I'm 
dog-tired now; up all night and two hours 
of this strain." 

"Well, your work is done. You can rest. 
He wants so much to live, it would be some- 
thing to have saved him. Is there a chance 
for him?" 

'*One may always hope. It is amazing 
what bodies will stand, especially young, 
healthy ones like this." 

February 5. 

He seems better this morning, moves his 
arms more easily, says he does not suffer. 
But his breathing is like a beginning of 
pneumonia. 

Later. 

On my way to ward VI, I meet one of the 
nurses : 

"How the guns roar. They say they are 
bombarding La Panne and are about to 
make a desperate attempt to get Verdun." 
The General says if it falls it will be of 



m 



180 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

no consequence. The guns have long been 
removed. But we shall try hard to make 
the Germans pay the price. By the way, 
the man with the round beard and the wound 
in his thigh has just died." 

"Who told you so? He seemed all right 
last night." 

"They fetched Baron half an hour ago to 
give him extreme unction. He was only 
just in time. A secondary haemorrhage. 
Every one was so busy they found it out 
too late." 

"Look, is that he they are carrying to the 
mortuary chapel.^" 

" No, they are coming from Salle I. That 
is the spinal case every one was so much 
interested in yesterday." 

"What! Not the nice blue-eyed man 
from Nantes who had four children. He 
dead, too?" 

"Not a complaint to the last. I never 
saw anything so heartrending. His pillow 
was soaked with blood." 

Fais-toi tout petit pour la vie, mais fais-toi 
grand pour la mort 



TRYING TO CUT KNOTS 

February 6. 

The Directress came back last night. Inter- 
views are the order of the day — interviews 
separately, interviews collectively, of all 
those who have taken any part in the late 
upheavals. 

She comes out of these encounters flying 
her bored executive manner and blowing cold 
on the French nurses for having espoused 
the cause of the once- valued Medecin-chef. 
She interviews De Precy. He sounds plaus- 
ible, and there is also that unimpeachable 
record of his. Arbitrarily foisted, perhaps, 
by those in authority into another man's 
shoes, he finds the situation painful and 
does not hide the fact. As for the flavour 
of De Clisson's finger in the pie, if flavour 
there be, it is too delicate for detection 
by a foreign palate. In any case, the hos- 

181 



182 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

pital must not be used as a tilting ground 
where private grievances may tourney un- 
challenged. And, besides, as Organization 
says, why should not the new doctors be 
as good as the old? 

Unhappily the chief actors in these moving 
scenes are so absorbed that they dress and 
undress for their parts in public, and rum- 
ours of '' explications sanglantes'^ have a 
way of oozing through the boards, long tell- 
tale streaks staining the surface of the sea 
of orderlies which like the waters of Venice — 
penetrate into every crevice and cranny of 
their confining walls. Words fly from well- 
licked idle tongue to idle tongue, and blood 
from the wounds of pride trickles, trickles, 
and spreads. 

February 7. 

The Chic Type, his hand in Inspecteur- 
general Muret's, comes to visit his old 
happy hunting ground and take part in a 
medical debate. 

''How ill;, how undone> he looks," sighs 
Moral Influence, 



A GREEN-TENT IN FLANDERS 183 

"You see how happy he is, did I not tell 
you so!" smiles the Directress. 

February 9. 

It almost looks as though Organization 
has a grouch; she certainly has a cold. 
For some days she has lain in her cot with 
her face to the wall, like Hezekiah, and figs 
cannot heal her hurt. " How wrong-headed 
and untrustworthy every one is. Life is 
so untidy; if only some one would fairly 
face cleaning it up, might it not easily be 
done." Baffled she returns to her happy 
home. Yet perhaps after all she has got 
what she came for. Her attache case 
bulges with documentary evidence of the 
obliquity of human nature especially as ob- 
served under torture in a field hospital. 

February 10. 

An unusual number of abdominal cases 
seem to come in. It may be only that, in 
the absence of our specialist, we are abnor- 
mally conscious of them, as for the necessity 
of super-expert intervention to meet the 



184 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

procession of bandaged heads so obsessing 
us with the mysterious horror of disfigura- 
tion. Since 1914, Frankenstein himself 
would be little more than one of a great 
family of shelterless spirits crouching behind 
newly hand-made faces — all their intimate 
personal values of touch with the outer 
world brutalized and shifted, so trivial a 
thing as a delicately perceived balance of 
what an eye, a nose, the curve of a lip or 
chin counts for in the success or failure of 
our reconnoitering expeditions into the 
world of our fellowmen — a hair value per- 
haps — ^grossly falsified. And yet that value 
inexorably moulds our conduct, whether of 
proud isolation or of kaleidoscopic and 
throbbing alliances. There is for these no 
longer their familiar cover. In such a 
carnival, bewildered eyes scan untried hori- 
zons. 

Outwardly the days begin to fall into line 
and roll on quietly enough. The toll of 
death just now is high and Basine's words 
"The soldier is sacrificed, the place-hunter 
triumphs" dig into our peace. But De 



^ A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 185 

Precy says nearly all the wounds are in- 
fected when they reach us. We cling to 
the reassuring record of his skill and to the 
evidence that he spares himself no pains. 

It is hard to gauge the attitude of the 
French nurses and of those of the old staff 
who are still here. How much of their 
distrust of the doctors of the auto-chir 
grows out of natural partisanship of old 
friends, how much is courage braving dis- 
pleasure in high places for the sake of fair 
play? 



THE EYE 

February 11. 

Can I ever forget that diamond eye! The 
owner of it was laughingly dubbed my best 
friend; and, truly, I think there was no day 
of his long weeks at the hospital when I was 
not uplifted by a sense of what lay behind 
that eye. It was really all that one could 
see of Mongodin, for the rest of his head and 
face — with the exception of what was visible 
through a small hole left in the bandages 
round his mouth, just big enough to pass his 
"petit regime through — was completely hid- 
den from us. 

It was in bed No. 20 of Salle I that he 
lay, or sat propped against his pillows, in a 
scarlet flannel bed -jacket — curious com- 
plement of the green eye through which 
alone he could establish relations with the 
world around him. 

186 



A GREEN TENT TN FLANDERS 187 

It could hardly be called a beautiful eye. 
No customary tag or triraniing could ap- 
propriately be applied to it. It was not 
even of a popular colour — blue, for instance, 
or violet or brown — but just of medium size 
and uncompromisingly, glitteringly green, 
with a small pupil and no lashes that I can 
remember, or lashes so scant and of so neu- 
tral a tint as to be insignificant. 

He was in the hospital when I arrived; 
and having as yet not been promoted to 
sitting up or to the distinction of the scarlet 
jacket, he was much too near the colour of 
his bed, much too flat and lifeless, to attract 
general attention. At first his still fragile 
whiteness frightened me. He seemed too 
brittle for such as I. I would sidle past him 
on tiptoe, fearing to add to his pain; but 
gradually, as it began to dawn upon me that 
the shining eye was responsive and could feel 
the comradeship of a mere, shy appreciative 
glance, I grew bolder, and^ after a few more 
of its encouraging looks, became its slave. 

Thus promoted, I would, when on my 
way past No. 20, pause for a moment and 



188 ;A green tent in FLANDERS 

palely reflect the eye's brave smile, murmur 
my conviction that an eye of that quality 
could really see more than any other two; 
then turn swiftly away, that it should not 
know how moved I was to divine the meas- 
ure of endurance buried in that small deep 
green pool with its glistening surface. 

His wound was just above the left temple 
— a triangular-shaped hole almost an inch 
and a half long and yawning nearly an inch 
wide on its upper side. The projectile had 
passed behind the left eye, damaging it 
(whether permanently we do not yet know), 
had opened a way down behind the nose, 
and had lodged rather forward in the roof of 
the mouth. It made his head seem like an 
empty hole. When I first knew him he 
could not speak; later, dark muflBed nasal 
sounds came from him, darkened still fur- 
ther by the dialect of his province. No one 
but those constantly with him could make 
out the meaning of the struggling words, 
though they suggested a humorous and 
plucky philosophy, as native to my friend 
as the colour of his eye. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 180 

The hour of his daily dressings was one 
for which I grew to time my visits to his 
ward. His nurse would then allow me to 
pass her what she needed and, while the 
ordeal lasted, to engage the eye in conversa- 
tion. The ordeal consisted partly in the 
excruciating change of meches and drains 
and in pouring through the gaping triangular 
temple wound streams of peroxide which 
would flow down behind the damaged left 
eye, behind the nose, and be caught by 
Mongodin himself, sitting up against his 
bed-rest, in a little white enamel kidney- 
dish which he would hold, without so much 
as wincing or even giving vent to any of 
those strange animal-like sounds which for 
the time being stood him instead of speech. 

Much later, the eye and these sounds to- 
gether managed to make clear to me that at 
first the doctors had wanted to extract the 
cruel lump of lead — which, tied up in a 
piece of muslin dressing, was now fastened 
to the head of his bed — through a hole they 
proposed to make in his jaw just under his 
nose. 



190 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

''But I, madame," pointing to the spot, 
"always felt the hard ridge in the roof of my 
mouth. And finally monsieur le major 
listened to me, et voila.'^ 

The first time he really spoke was to 
make some joking comment on the talk of 
his neighbours, which they repeated among 
themselves until his next gay sally. One 
day two slightly wounded men near him 
were discussing decorations and saying how 
much, should their turn ever come, they 
would prefer the Military Medal to the Cross 
of Honour: for, "does it not carry a hundred 
francs pension with it?" 

Mongodin's dressing was going on at the 
time and the bandages loosened roiuid his 
ears made him keenly alive to their conver- 
sation. Without removing his kidney -dish 
from his lips, he rolled out in his nasal 
drawl, between the streams of peroxide: 

"I, for one, mes vieux, would much prefer 
the Cross of Honour." 

An eye is perhaps a small thing, and a 
green one at that. But when the General 
with his naked sword saluted Mongodin in 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 191 

the name of the Repubhc and pinned to the 
red flannel bed-jacket both the Croix de 
Guerre and the Medaille Mihtaire, we, the 
onlookers, had long guessed how the owner 
of two alert green eyes, look-outs of an un- 
flinching spirit, had seen his chance and had 
sprung to take it. 



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FILLING IN THE BACKGROUND 

February 1%, 

Organization gone; the Chic Type dis- 
posed of; the auto-chir, Moral Influence, 
and La Basine keeping a vigilant eye on 
one another; Art once more begins to peep 
through the eyes of the Directress. Her 
natural interest in the puzzle of life comes 
through her languid manner. "What a 
stimulating mentality French women have 
— they are so widely aware. And aware- 
ness, is it not after all the gurgling well- 
spring of Art? How ineffectual even genius 
is as an asset — nothing more than a 
barely perceptible volatile essence of per- 
sonality — ^until eye has consumingly pene- 
trated eye and consciousness has dipped 
itself in form. If perchance these women's 
vision should be the right one, and not to 
show fight should, as they say, be a base 

192 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 193 

capitulation?" The Directress would not 
like to have a hand in baseness, and con- 
flicting rumours from the operating room 
and from the wards make her a trifle un- 
easy. Searchlights flare again across our 
sky and linger on the auto-chir. Auto-chirs 
are made to roll. If only this one could be 
induced to roll away from us. A brand- 
new medical staff would settle all scores and 
give us back our peace of mind. 

February 13. 

Ten bombs fell in the dusky morning 
somewhere on the near horizon. We saw 
the flashes and our shacks trembled. 

It has snowed heavily all night and now it 
thaws dismally. Drip, drip, drip, drip, into 
the tubs outside our huts; drip, rusty drip 
on to our clean white caps, as we pass under 
the elbows of soaking stove pipes bent up- 
ward over every door. 

Front trenches near us have been cap- 
tured. Madame Bosecke's cart brings up a 
report this morning that the boches are 
laying pipes from Bruges to as near Ypres 



194 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

as they can get. Asphyxiating gas, driven 
through them at high pressure, will spread 
from five to seven kilometers from the end 
of the tube. We are all to have masks, 
adds the report, and the enemy may be in 
Paris in a week. If so, what of us.^^ Shall 
we become a German concentration camp 
or be driven farther on? Trenches are 
being dug, and active preparations are ap- 
parently being made along the Dunkirk 
road to meet a possible advance. But we 
need not worry. While here Organization, 
alive to emergencies, set afoot a relief 
expedition stretching through various hands 
to Washington, and back directly to our 
field. Our lightest call will make the 
wires hum ! To be forewarned is to be fore- 
armed. 

February 14. 

At midnight, after an ominously unusual 
silence, there is a long chain of terrific 
explosions; then a pause and three more 
explosions; another pause and explosion 
after explosion, dying away along the line. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 105 

until there is nothing but a distant echo. 
Out of it all eighteen newcomers are 
brought in, some of them very bad cases. 
Six of these men had been sitting round a 
fire in their colonel's quarters when a shell 
came through the roof and burst, killing 
two and wounding the other four. 

A big batch of orderlies inoculated against 
typhoid are on the sick list, and the grum- 
bling list, too. Every sound pair of legs has 
double work to do. 




THE SMILE 



February 15. 

In Ward I, Jean Magnard lies dying. 

"Tchou-tchou, tchou . . ." sighs the 
pain through his lips. It is one of those 
cases — wounds in the shoulder, side, and 
thigh — for which they have not known what 
first to do. They have cut off the right leg at 
the hip but have not stopped the gangrene, 
the smell of which by now is suffocating. 

We all know it to be a question of hours. 
He is a middle-aged man, a territorial, with 
a lean body and a fine, rough-hewn face, 
the high sallow cheek bones dropping in 

196 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 197 

angular lines down to the chin where blacl; 
and white bristles grow in desolate isolation 
or in no less desolate scant little groups ^ 
The lank, iron-gray hair falls in limp streaks 
over the lined forehead. The small, keen 
eyes open sometimes in acknowledgment of 
any little service or in moments of alleviated 
pain. The thin voice shapes words from 
time to time, mostly unfamiliar names; but 
as evening comes on even these fail and at 
intervals growing longer and longer only the 
sibilant, plaintive refrain " tchou-tchou " 
breaks the silence. 

Behind the screen, by the bed, a nurse 
sits trying to quiet the bony hands as they 
tear at the bandages or restlessly pick the 
bedclothes, by holding them in her own — 
a grasp his haK-wandering mind confuses 
perhaps with that of some absent hand, for 
at moments he pulls himself out of his stupor 
and peers probingly at the white figure beside 
him, then the eyelids drop wearily, as he 
gives up the effort to reach back from so far. 

At last the long, dismal day draws in 
to dusk. The refrain mournfully, monot- 



198 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

onously blown through the lips has almost 
ceased. There is a shuffling among the 
orderlies. The sound of rapid footsteps 
comes down the long ward. The General 
stands at the foot of the bed. Lamplight 
glints on his drawn sword and on the Croix 
de Guerre hanging from the ribbon which 
he holds in his hand. 

*'In the name of the Republic — to you, 
Jean Magnard" — ^familiar words and oft 
repeated in these shacks anchored too near 
the breaking end of the turbulent waves 
of human strife not to catch the spindrift of 
their shattered endeavour — "In the name 

of the Republic " The erect old 

soldier leans forward, gently pushes back 
the damp wisps of hair and kisses the dying 
man. Then with a hand on one of the re- 
laxed cold ones he murmurs, "Merci, Fami." 

There is a flutter of the eyelids and a smile 
slackens the drawn lips. 

That smile — was it for us and for our 
tiny piece of brown metal as we stand by his 
bed stranded *'this side the sheer coast of 
eternity," or when he smiled, were we al- 
ready out of focus? 




"Will one of you nurses 
leave that nice fire and go at 
once to Orchine? Some one 
there has been badly burned 
and they have sent a boy 
flying up to the hospital for 
help. You will go. Miss 
Carr? Then you, madame, 
will you pass by the phar- 



199 



200 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

macy and order two bottles of picric acid and 
two of distilled water? I will run to the linen 
room for cotton-wool and bandages and 
will meet you at the gate. By the way, 
Rosalie, tell Johnson to get the car ready." 

How bitterly cold it is. The pond is 
crusted with ice along the bank. One of 
the ducks hesitates dangerously near the 
transparent inner edge, which slips into a 
centre of black water where the others 
put up a feint of enjoying their swim. Over- 
head the sky opens and shuts: heavy white 
clouds sway and curtsey to earth's emo- 
tions, tantalizingly uncovering and then 
again hurrying to blot out patches of deep 
blue — ^like lids drawn suddenly over smart- 
ing eyes that have looked on both sides of 
that line where cruel guns never cease to 
snarl and splutter. 

We are ready at last. Leaving the wind- 
mill on our right we bump along the village 
street with its double row of cottages, their 
colour heightened by the oozing in and ooz- 
ing out of an all-pervading dampness. 

At the estaminety usually so clean and 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 201 

shining, the tables are askew, the chairs 
pushed back, the half-empty bottles and 
glasses from the revel of the night before 
still unwashed. 

A pretty mother lets us in. Shrewdly 
peering through the disfiguring, tear-bruised 
circles round her eyes one might guess her 
to be about thirty -five. There is something 
in her manner beyond the mere pain and 
horror of the moment — something almost 
haunted or stricken by remorse which 
stealthily impresses itself on my conscious- 
ness. She leads us on, talking in hurried, 
broken words. 

Germaine had been up early to see her 
fiance off. His leave had already been 
prolonged beyond the twenty-four hours 
that had been granted. There was barely 
time for him, as it was, to get back to head- 
quarters. So to hurry on the fire lighting 
Germaine had poured gasolene. . . . Her 
first instinct had been to save her face and 
hands by wrapping them in the little shawl 
she wore round her shoulders. Then, feeling 
the flames take hold of her, she had run out 



202 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

into the back yard and rolled herself in the 
snow. Her fiance, hearing her cries for 
help, had come rushing downstairs, and see- 
ing her flaming there had finally put the fire 
out with his military cloak — but not before 
she had been shockingly burned. . . . 

"This way, upstairs." 

The narrow wooden staircase up which 
we climb is so steep that instinctively 
we lean back a little, and the steps are so 
shallow that our feet suddenly feel uncom- 
fortably big. At the top, on a little landing, 
are groups of neighbours, aghast but pity- 
ing, pressing around the village doctor. 
His shrug, in answer to their inquiries, is far 
from reassuring. 

''Ah^ voila — the nurses with the dress- 
mgs! 

We push through the door to her bedside. 
Her bed — large and double — might almost 
be said to be the whole room. At one side 
of it is scant space to pass to the tiny deeply 
embrasured window. An empty champagne 
bottle and two used glasses stand on the 
window sill. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 203 

On the only chair, his back to the window, 
his head buried in his hands, his whole body 
shaken by sobs, crouches the fiance. At 
the foot of the bed, on the wall, is a por- 
celain benitier presided over by a some- 
what pagan Infant Jesus, his pink flesh 
tones and yellow curly hair singing out the 
only notes of colour on those whitewashed 
walls unbroken by picture or other orna- 
ment. A dark beamed ceiling and wooden 
wainscot give a compact and almost cell- 
like look of distinction to the small square 
room. 

The fiance hears us and looks up. He is 
late. He must go. Had he forgotten that.^ 
But how can he tear himself away and leave 
in quivering distortion that which only 
last night, only this morning, had been 
the desirable and desired body of this 
girl? 

The curlers are still in her hair which 
grows in a straight line across a rather low 
forehead. A heavy tress has come loose 
and streams in brown waves over the pillow. 
The young face with its clear olive skin and 



204 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

dark eyes give all his hideous dream the lie. 
The sheet hides the rest. What h this swift, 
unmeasured judgment that has fallen on 
them? Perhaps now, if — no one need ever 

know Yet how pick up old threads 

with this, which he has helped to do, skulk- 
ing in his mind.^ 

He is in a trap. There is no escape. His 
lips almost savagely fall on Germaine's. 

One little night Of course, he had 

known he would have to pay — something 
within his means. But life, the usurer, 
lurking in the shadow, has its hand on their 
throats and is claiming all. How insuffer- 
able to be the writhing prey, the puppet, of a 
force like that ! Sacredieu ! Even with his 
lips on hers and the jealous, passionate chal- 
lenge in his heart, he cannot shut out the 
memory of those vampire flames. Has 
savage virtue, suddenly incarnate fire, 
charred the impulse and turned to ashes 
what had delusively seemed to him no 
more than a legitimate moment seized from 
the bitter denial of life in the trenches? 

How sweet her lips — and how young, how 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 205 

young! Before he knew it he had clattered 
downstairs and was wildly splashing through 
the icy puddles and along the cobbled street 
— away, away, that he might not see again 
what had lain bare to him before they drew 
the sheet up to her chin. 

At nightfall two of us are again on our 
way to the estaminet. We carry our night 
nurses' lantern, which flickers darkly in the 
clear, consuming moonlight. 

"Quivalh?'' 

Two sentinels come out from behind a 
corner swinging another lantern. It throws 
pale blades of light, like a reflection of some 
huge electric fan, across the road and up the 
fantastic faces of the cottages. 

"Show your cards. You have forgotten 
them? We regret infinitely, mesdames, but 
we have formal orders. You cannot pass 
without your cards." 

"Have patience, messieurs. The girl so 
badly burned this morning is dying. We 
are from the hospital. It is very late. The 
day has been a busy one." 

The murky lantern light plays lingeringly 



206 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

for a moment on our faces and on our 
nurses' dress. 

"Oh — Germaine? Bon. Passez^ mes 
swurs, and tell us on your way back how 
she is." 

Such a moonlight ! We pause a moment on 
the first bridge to look over the desolate cold 



spaces. The unbridled waters of the canal 
have crawled over the banks and stolen a 
march on all the sleeping levels of the plain. 
Here and there hoary willows, their awe- 
struck hair on end, hold solemn watch over 
fields where, so few months before, stinking 
pools of blood in place of water had dried up 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 207 

under a hot summer sun. Such a moon- 
Ught! Large stepping stones, Hke silver 
Hues, sparkle as with the sentinel willows 
they tell out the miles to the far-away red- 
dish horizon which our eyes eagerly scan. 

On the chair by Germaine's bed, where 
the fiance so undone had sobbed in the early 
morning, is the gnarled old uncle, crooning 
over the girl and tenderly passing spoonfuls 
of champagne and water, or little feeding- 
cups full of beer, through her dry lips. 

"Throw me into the Yser! I'm parched, 
I'm parched. A little beer; oh, I'm parched. 
Throw me into the Yser!" 

There is nothing we can do but moisten 
the bandages, raise and support the tor- 
tured body a little. Everywhere picric acid 
has soaked through, mottling sheets and 
bandages and drying in violent yellow 
plaques. Our shadows are thrown across 
the bed and up almost menacingly on the 
whitewashed walls to the ceiling, where the 
phantom heads are lost in the gloom of dark 
beams. The too-pink Infant Jesus, lean- 
ing out from the wall with his showy yellow 



208 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

hair, catches a ray of light as he holds out, 
all unheeded, his little shell-pool of holy 
water. 

On our way to the front door we turn to 
the mother. The brown patches round her 
eyes have deepened and spread, and seem 
now to eat up the whole face. They are 
repeated on the face of the aunt standing 
behind her, in the doorway of the neat back 
parlour. Neither asks a question. Neither 
says a word. On both faces is passive suf- 
fering, a simple, superstitious acceptance, 
bowing before the perception flashed for a 
second through torn curtains of conscious- 
ness. 

Retribution? Has it fallen in the midst 
of unthinking joyous days.f^ The shadowy 
Being, dealing out justice from the un- 
plumbed — has he suddenly turned his re- 
volving eye on them, and on Germaine up- 
stairs, who has never been known to shed 
a tear, and who is perhaps their scapegoat.^ 
If so, what use to struggle? Why senselessly 
flap and flutter wings so hopelessly, so ir- 
revocably singed? 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 209 

We feel cheap as, looking into those 
stained and stolid faces, we proffer lying 
words of comfort, relative only to eyes that 
have not seen. Yet the brutal fact will 
crush them soon enough. May they not 
furtively steal a moment of hope before the 
curtain falls? 

*'You see, Moral Influence, there was 
nothing to be done from the first. From 
her breasts to her knees she was hideously 
burned. She suffered shockingly, of course, 
and never changed her lament: ' Mon 
pauvre ventre ! Jetez-moi dans V Yser I 
mon ventre, mon pauvre ventre I Jetez-moi 
dans V Yser /' They laid her out in a cotton- 
flannel night dress she had saved up her sous 
to buy — striped blue and pink, with a 
scalloped embroidered edge. ' Embroidered 
by hand! Just see how pretty it is!' Her 
mother had been obliged to lay it on the bed 
near her through the last night, that the 
nurses might put it on when they should 
change her dressings in the morning. The 
dancing brown hair was crushed into a tight, 



210 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

modest little cap, which gave an almost au- 
stere purity to the outline of the delicate 
features. The hands and face were un- 
scarred, and the body under the sheet kept 
that look of hers — so like a strong young 
sapling. Poor little Germaine ! " 

"Germaine did you say? Not Germaine 
of the estaminet between the two bridges?" 

"Yes, that's the girl." 

'^ Ah, maintenant fy suis. A pet of the 
staff of the operating room and of the old 
doctor's, too. One heard her name con- 
stantly. It was always: 'Have you seen 
Germaine?' or, 'I am going to see Germaine.' 
She was quite a favourite. These village 
girls, you know. . . TienSy tiens I c'est 

eiur 



CHARACTER 

February 17. 

Mathurin Godard lies in bed 20 of Salle I. 
He has a clean-cut face, rather wide than 
long, small, delicate features, and a fine skin, 
its whiteness pointed by the scarlet semi- 
circle of a half-closed, bloodshot eye. He is 
wounded in the head, and in the thigh too 
high up for amputation, and gas gangrene 
has set in. The flesh comes away in pieces 
under the scalpel: there is nothing to be 
done for him. At first he is restless and 
complaining, but he allows himself to be 
soothed. 

During the night he dictates a letter to his 
home : 

"Dear Uncle and Aunt : I am here, wounded, 
though my wounds are much less serious than I at 
first feared. I am drinking orange juice as I write 
this by the hand of a nurse who is very good to me. 

211 



212 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

Tell Rene his father has won the Croix de Guerre and 
the M6daille Militaire — he may be proud of him 
when he grows up. As to business matters, do not 
worry. After a year without me, you know better 
what to do than I. Your affectionate nephew, 

"Mathurin Godabd " 

He is continuously thoughtful of his 
nurses and will accept no dainty without 
offering them a share. 

"Why are you so good to us? You must 
be very tired after being up all night." 

Soon the tell-tale screens are drawn round 
his bed. One of the night nurses is still up 
and wishes to remain with him through the 
luncheon hour. But the nurse of Salle I 
will not hear of it. 

"The orderlies are there to look after 
him; more than that is pure sentimentality." 

When his nurse comes back from her mid- 
day rest, Mathurin lies dead, alone. The 
orderlies are playing cards in the pantry. 

The hospital is shocked by this man's 
death. He has awakened its sympathy. 

The aunt of Mathurin, a cobbler's wife 
and younger than her nephew, arrives at 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 213 

three o'clock from Brittany. The Adminis- 
tration has telegraphed for her, but she 
comes just too late. 

She weeps bitterly, rocks herself and sobs. 
We try to comfort her, tell her how good 
he has been, how brave, how considerate. 
She listens curiously. 

"Yes, Mathurin had character. You tell 
me he was decorated and a hero? He cer- 
tainly had character. He was gardener to 
the lady up at the chateau. His mistress 
thought everything of him. He was honest, 
it is true, and never spared himself. At one 
time he was a little hard. Yes, undoubtedly 
he was hard. He expected of others, you 
see, madame, what he himself gave. But 
one could not keep pace with him. His 
girl wife did not understand him and she 
lived only two years. Rene is with us now. 
He is a delicate little chap and needs care. 
One hundred francs a year pension goes with 
the Medaille, is that not so? Ah, only fifty 
when the decorated one dies? Only fifty 
francs. Well, even so you need not be 
afraid. Rene shall never want for a home. 



214 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

and I will tell him you say his father died a 
hero. Think of it, Mathurin a hero! He 
certainly had character. I should not wish 
you to think, madame, that it surprises me 
to hear he did his duty." ' 




A DAB AT THE BACKGROUND 

February 18. 

Rumours float about of anonymous letters 
having been sent to headquarters denounc- 
ing the auto-chir. To suspect Moral In- 
fluence or La Basine of sending them any 
more than De Precy of inventing the fable 
for his own ends would be equally wide of 
the mark. All three have dramatic minds 
picturesquely forceful in their view of one an- 
other, but a backbiter, anonymously or not, 
no one of the three could ever be. De Precy 
is anxious to sift the matter. However clean- 
handed he may be, he is harassed. He loses 
his temper and falls out with the Directress. 

"The old medical staff could never have 
been so discourteous," she sums it up. 

Moral Influence and the Directress once 
more sit hand in hand. What had better 
be done? 

215 



216 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

February 19. 

The General stands at the door. He is a 
real general and a fine old gentleman — thin, 
correct, every inch a soldier. His face is 
grave. What is this that he hears of dissat- 
isfaction with the doctors, questioning of 
authority and all the rest.f* Any complaints, 
duly reported, will be sifted, but changes the 
Service de Sante may, with his sanction, 
have seen fit to make touch no one's dig- 
nity and must not be challenged. The 
civilian mind and the military mind are 
the poles apart. The hard lesson to be 
learned here by all is to obey in silence. He 
in his time has known the taste of that 
unpalatable cup. 

February 20. 

While the Directress was in Bailleul to- 
day the town was bombarded and about one 
hundred people injured. 

February 21. 

Moral Influence and La Basine leave for a 
holiday in Paris where, as free civilians. 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 217 

they need cultivate neither De Precy nor 
neutral and submissive hearts. 

February 24. 

Every one has long been silently or 
noisily chewing his or her portion of vache 
enragee — the enraged cow of suppressed 
emotion. The Directress finds the fare 
narrow and the Boite tasteless without 
Moral Influence and La Basine. Their 
effervescence, their knowledge of their own 
people, their impulsive reactions and warm- 
heartedness, leave a blank. They were, 
after all, one of our corner stones. Is it 
merely fancy, or is a purely Anglo-American 
nursing staff a trifle dulL^^ Where are its 
feelers? And De Precy, his temper not- 
withstanding, still reigns triumphant. The 
Directress herself will go on leave. 

February 28. 

It is very cold. Two of us have an errand 
to the oculist at Zuydecoote, the only one 
for miles around. We must cross the Bel- 
gian lines. Sentinels dart out of their straw 



218 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

boxes, scrutinize our papers, and refuse to 
let us through. We lack some last local 
shibboleth. Yet our errand is pressing. 
Our Parisianized Belgian driver gets down, 
and a long pantomime of gesticulation fol- 
lows which we see through the misty win- 
dows. The persuasive wit of the Capital 
tells finally with the good-natured peasant 
sentinels, or is it the warmth of their straw 
boxes casts the vote in our favour? 

We seem to skim on wings along the road 
to the sea. The ubiquitous, brightly washed 
cottages, canals, and airy wind-mills, rise 
up to meet us and fall flat again on to the 
endless plains. Every here and there are 
the earmarks of war — freshly dug, half- 
flooded trenches and protecting mazes of 
wire entanglement — then the masterly, far- 
flung line of the seashore with its flanking 
sand dunes. Have the free waves, all 
along, been racing and breaking over the 
sand, while we behind our ditch and our 
hedge have been huddled in, oppressed and 
anxious? 

Our business over, we are shown some- 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 211) 

thing of the model hospital with its own 
farms, its comfortable shacks for convales- 
cents, and the great work its tired-looking 
oculist is doing for all the wounded eyes of 
the countryside. We thirstily drink in the 
invigorating sea-salted air, and turn home- 
ward with tingling, fresh-washed minds. 
What a clearing of vision the sight of open 
running lines can be to those who live in 
circles. 

The Long and Short of It 

March 2. 

The Parisian butcher, wounded in the 
head, has meningitis. He is a handsome 
man in a butcherly way — a heavy frame, 
kinky black hair, and a high colour. All 
the afternoon, over and over again, he 
unceasingly makes the same mysterious 
hieroglyphs on the screen by his bed and 
on a piece of paper. 

Over and over and over again, always 
illegible, he makes them until he dies. 



ANGLES OF VISION 

March 7. 

A CIVILIAN is brought in from the nearest 
village. He was about to be mobilized 
when he shot himself in the foot — acci- 
dentally. Whispers of ''embusque'^ float in 
the air. The orderlies are summary in their 
judgments. 

A young boy who is taken to Salle IV 
has a badly wounded arm which he hardly 
seems conscious of. The mention of a 
hypodermic puts him into a panic and he 
yells when he sees the nurse preparing it. 
The other men, who feel somewhat like 
well-used pincushions themselves, chaff him 

unmercifully. 

March 8. 

Monsieur ITnspecteur-general comes to- 
morrow from Paris. He is to inspect the 
hospital. His reputation for spleen has 

220 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 221 

galloped on before him and makes us rather 
uneasy. We cast a searching eye on our 
surroundings, on the look-out for a chance 
cloven foot. 

March 9. 

Monsieur Tlnspecteur-general has ar- 
rived, fat and administrative looking, in a 
luxurious limousine. He is on a tour of 
inspection. 

A little knot forms respectfully around 
him — our Medecin-Inspecteurof every week, 
the Medecin-chef, the Gestionnaire, and a 
thin trail of others. 

"Ah, ah, so this is Ward I.^ This is 
Ward II.? This is Ward III? What is the 
matter with this man?" 

"Peritonitis." 

"What is the treatment?" (To the Mede-^ 
cin~chef.) "Bon. Why are those cup- 
boards so full of things .f^ — there are new- 
comers at all hours, you need them under 
your hand? Send three quarters of that 
stuff away — the drugs to the pharmacy, the 
linen and dressings to the lingerie. And 



2n A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

this bottle without a label. Where is the 
nurse who keeps in her cupboard a bottle 
without a label? Send her to me. And in 
this pantry, a pair of shoes! Who ever 
heard of keeping shoes in the pantry of a 
ward.? — shoes and bed-pans and saucepans 
all mixed up. It is a scandal! You, 
Medecin-chef, why do you allow such 
things .f^ And what is this you tell me 
about being short of space in the operat- 
ing room and needing another shack? 
Where is your surgical automobile? What 
end does it serve? Have it brought here. 
Drain this swamp and set up your own oper- 
ating room. There is no difficulty. Who 
ever heard of such a thing! Let me see 
that man's card. He has had twenty grains 
of anti-tetanus serum? Twenty grains! 
Grave consequences might result. Who 
ever heard of giving twenty grains in one 
dose! You say it was done at the dressing 
station? His card, I see, is a green one. 
That is from Bosinghe. I shall make an 
investigation. Ah, so this is the kitchen! 
What is brewing on your fire, chef?" 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 223 

"Potato soup." 

"I see, I see — always soup. Soup is like 
the sea; all things go into it and out of it 
comes only soup. Where do you keep the 
bread? Ah, it is here. Dear me, what a 




scandal! Who ever heard of such a thing? 
The bread stacked on shelves and no gauze 
over it. Do you not know, you chef, you 
Medecin-chef, you Gestionnaire, that the 
fly is an insidious enemy of man? No 
gauze over the bread! I must report that. 
The coffee has given out. How is that, 
chef?" The chef pauses. 

*'It has been given to the newxomers to 
make their castor oil palatable." 



224 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

"How many newcomers have you had 
this month, Medecin-chef ? They must in- 
deed sorely have needed to be purged. 
Who ever heard of such a thing! An in- 
quiry must be made. And those dogs .f* Why 
are they allowed to run all over the place?" 

"They are pets." 

"Pets.f^ They must all be sent away. 
Dogs are filthy beasts and a menace to 
mankind. And those ducks? Perhaps you 
will tell me that the ducks, too, are pets?" 

"Oh, the ducks. Monsieur ITnspecteur — 
we, as you see, sit on a damp plain. We 
keep the ducks to eat the mosquitoes." 

"Bon, bon! That is good. Prevention 
Is better than cure. Ajid this is the lingerie? 
What a strange place ! It is quite a depart- 
ment store. Why pile things on cupboards; 
you have no room?" 

Behind the Inspecteur's back the Ges- 
tionnaire signals to Tessac to be silent. 

"Have everything taken off the cup- 
boards. You must make room. To have 
room for everything is the soul of order. 
Now, for the operating room." 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 225 

An operation is going on. The surgeon 
pauses a moment and looks up to offer a 
word of explanation. 

*'We have nearly finished." 

"Nearly finished .^^ And you still con- 
tinue with the chloroform! Stop it at once. 
Who ever heard of such a thing!" 

At last it is over. Executive Wonder 
turns away his eye. The hospital falls 
back with a sigh into its arduous life of all 
the days. The tired doctors and nurses 
exchange glances. Who ever heard of such 
a thing! 




March 10. 

The Zepps were abroad again last night. 
1 was just gomg to bed when the firing 
began, but I was in time to see the flashes of 
anti-au'craft guns and the glare of a fire in 
the sky. Madeleine says the farm from 



226 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

which the searchhght was played on the 
intruders was burned down. This is part 
of our daily bread of rumour. 

The Directress is back from her holiday, 
and the Boite is glad to see her pretty figure 
in its bright cloak flitting in and out of the 
wards — ^is glad also to shift its responsi- 
bilities on to her shoulders. She is pleased, 
and so is every one, with a report Monsieur 
le Gestionnaire has been drawing up on our 
first year's work. We have only lost one 
man in every thirteen and — since, for the 
most part, only the worst cases are brought 
to us — the hospital may be proud of its 
record. 



CHUMS 

March 12. 

The French protestant, a bookkeeper, Is 
still in bed. He has been as near death as 
one can go without irrevocably crossing 
the line — at least what we call irrevocably. 
Haemorrhage has followed haemorrhage and, 
one night when I went into the operating 
room, he lay on one of the tables rolled up 
in blankets and whiter than I have ever seen 
living flesh. They were afraid to move him 
and left him there all night. I was gently 
tiptoeing away when his eyes opened and a 
smile lighted up his saintly face. 

"I am going to God; how good God is; 
how good He has been to me. No one can 
ever reach the limits of His mercy." And 
tears of emotion welled up and trickled over 
the thin cheek bones. I leaned over him 
and breathed. 

227 



228 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

"Will you not try to stay with us?" 

"Yes, if God wills. But I hear Kim call. 
Only think, ma^dame, what it will be to see 
His face." 

"What a beautiful and edifying death he 
is dying," his nurse, little Madame Thomas, 
whispered. 

He had been rapt and talking like that at 
intervals for hours. They did not stop 
him, as it seemed to quiet and ease him to 
talk on. When his surgeon came to say 
"Good-night" and see that all was well, 
he thanked him for what he had done for 
him and said: 

"Embrace me, Major, for I am going to 
God." 

Yet he pulled through and lay for many 
days quietly smiling, apparently as content 
to stay as to go. When a faint colour had 
begun to steal back into his cheeks, he 
beckoned me to him: 

"Madame, can you get me any news of an 
Adjutant Massy, my chief and very good 
comrade .f^ We were wounded together. He 
is simply topping; there is no one at all like 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 229 

him. You could not fail to know him — 
a small dark man with shining eyes. I 
have written him a letter, but I do not 
know where to send it." 

'* Massy?" I queried. "The name is 
familiar. Why, of course, he is in the very 
next ward. Bright-eyed and game as you 
say, but, poor chappy, he has lost his right 
arm and the greater part of his right foot. 
Give me your letter; I will be your post- 



man." 



Adjutant Massy was all his protestant 
friend claimed for him and more. Hardly 
had they cut off his arm than he asked for 
pencil and paper and began making marks 
with his left hand which gradually grew 
into a letter to his wife. His case was not 
quite a simple one, for the wound in his 
foot was infected. During three weeks of 
great suffering I only once saw him de- 
pressed and peevish, and that was one 
evening after they had, for a third time, 
taken a piece off his foot. I was in the 
operating room when he was brought in, 
and when they unbandaged the wound he 



230 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

knew by the look of it, as soon as the sur- 
geon did, what was to follow. I simply 
could not bear his pluck and fled. Later in 
his own bed and in great pain, he reviled his 
fate, and we caught for a moment the 
measure of his long self -discipline. 

At the end of four weeks our adjutant 
could write almost as well with his left 
hand as he had ever written with his right. 
The small, neat handwriting so characteris- 
tic of a certain class in France. 

While he was at his worst his wife was 
sent for. She was an embroidress — an 
"artiste," her husband said — working for 
the big French dressmakers, and so enam- 
oured of her work that when, at the time of 
the Brussels Exhibition, a certain dress was 
attracting general attention, she had jour- 
neyed all the way to the Belgian capital to 
see its famous embroidery. 

She came immediately though, as she 
confided to me later, *' there is a gosse on 
the way, and travelling this weather is not 
easy." For days she sat by his bedside, 
holding the clever left hand, and making 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 231 

plans with him for the time when he would 
be well enough to be sent on to Paris. When 
she could not be in the ward, she spent her 
time walking up and down the plank-walks 
with the protestant bookkeeper's wife, who 
had also hurried to the hospital when the 
Administration had sounded the note of 
alarm on her husband's account. They 
were an amusing contrast. The little Pari- 
sian in touch with the fashions and giv- 
ing to the simplest clothing a smack of the 
Capital, and the wife from the provinces, 
all her goodness in her honest rosy face, 
her stiff felt hat perched independently high 
on the shiny tightly braided hair, her 
shabby black merino skirt dipping at the 
back. 

In times of peace. Adjutant Massy had 
been a traveller for a large house of per- 
fumery, and he boasted that he could tell 
at a sniff the quality of any scent — ^par- 
ticularly of Eau de Cologne to the birthright 
of which there are so many pretenders. One 
morning I brought him a tiny bottle of some 
that had been given to me for Christmas. 



232 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

He tried it and passed verdict: "Very good 
and very old; c'est a base defleurs d'oranger." 
Then rubbing a drop between his fingers, 
and with evident delight: "Do you not 
perceive how light, how exquisite a bouquet 
it has?" 

When I wished him good-bye he said: 
"I still have some of your Eau de Cologne. 
I have consulted my friend the barber about 
it — Monsieur Adolphe, in the bed here on 
my right. He also is a connoisseur and he 
shares my opinion that it would be hard to 
find better — very old and imdoubtedly 
a base defleurs d^oranger.'' 

In what may one not specialize in a field 
hospital? 




s^ 



2:> 



THE BOOT 

March 13. 

The sun rises at last on a glisten- 
ing world. All night a furious 
cannonade has broken the secre- 
tive silence of the falling snow. 
It has grown at times so violent 
that our shacks have creaked 
and rocked and our beds rum- 
bled under us, as though sharply 
twitched and springing back with 




23d 



234 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

a vibratory movement, starting from the cor- 
ner pointing toward the loudest noise. 

High up, to the right, stodgily swings a 
saucisse keeping watch on the enemy Hnes, 
and aeroplanes, with their painted disks — 
red, white, and blue — ^buzz over us like 
great blow-flies. More and more of them 
speckle the distance, while little balls of 
smoke, now black, now white, materialize 
around them for a moment, then are un- 
wound and dragged in long, feathery wakes 
by the light breeze, until finally engulfed in 
the insatiable blue of the cloudless day. 

Uninterruptedly the routine of the hos- 
pital runs on to the accompaniment of the 
continuous roar along the front. Up and 
down the wooden pathways the stretcher 
bearers carry the wounded from their 
wards to the operating room and back again 
to their beds, the scarlet stretcher blankets 
showing up against the snow. There is 
plenty of time to-day to attend to them all. 
Between two mouthfuls of smoke a wounded 
soldier quietly remarks, *'0n ta^pe la-has J^ 

In the afternoon our dapper General, in 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 235 

immaculate red trousers, dustless black 
coat, and braided cap, his hand on the 
shining scabbard at his side, pauses for a 
moment to hsten. Then, looking along the 
suffering beds, he says exultantly: ''C'est 
moi qui tire!'' All day long, bang and 
rattle, rattle and bang — a series of appar- 
ently disconnected explosions, or the con- 
tinuous jarring sound of machine-guns, 
like long heavy chains dragged clanking 
through iron hawse-holes, the whole form- 
ing in my mind a rhythmic sequence to 
which a graphic form — linked loops and 
dots, domed curves and sharply pointed 
angles, jerked from the point of some 
monster telegraphic needle — might perhaps 
be given. 

For twenty -four hours no newcomers. 
The obsession of the thundering guns 
lifts from our spirits as we remember the 
General's words and begin to hope the damage 
done is all on the other side. 

It is nearly dinner time. Suddenly three 
whistles announcing the arrival of blesses 
30und shrilly. Off I speed, trying to keep 



236 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

my balance on the narrow paths now slip- 
pery in the evening frost. Standing at the 
door of the salle d'attetite are two ambu- 
lances, the drivers with grave faces holding 
lanterns, while stretcher bearers gently lift 
or help the wounded out of the cars. Two, 
four, six, seven — they are all in now. 

I follow them into the long room round 
which, from lanterns, dim, black-framed 
slices of light move unsteadily. Three 
men, variously bandaged, stand facing me, 
smiling ** Good-evening." On stretchers on 
the floor are four shapeless heaps. 

A second — to check a wave of sick ap- 
prehension at sight of them. 

Whose need is the most pressing? We 
unwrap the blankets, lift them one by one on 
to beds. But here is one who cannot be 
moved. He seems unconscious. The left 
trouser has been split open to the top leav- 
ing bare a leg, the knee a little raised, 
mottled blue by gunpowder. It lies queerly 
zigzag on the stretcher, in an un-leglike 
way. The right leg is bandaged, as are 
also the whole right arm and hand, of which 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 237 

the bandages are soaked with recent bleed- 
ing. The upper part of the left arm, too, is 
bandaged, and as for the head — tiny rivu- 
lets of blood from scalp, forehead, and nose, 
have trickled down it like some ghastly wig 
combed over the face, leaving nothing 
familiarly human visible, and have spread 
to neck and chest as far as we can see 
through the partly open shirt. 

Is this thing, lying there so still, alive .^^ 
"Hot- water bottles quickly!'' I take the 
right boot off the frozen foot and am just 
beginning to cut the laces of the other heavy 
boot which still hangs on the end of the limp 
blue leg, when a clear, firm voice says: 
" Don't give yourself the trouble, madame, to 
remove that. When they cut off my leg 
the boot can come off with it." 

I look up and catch the glance of two 
steady bright young eyes peering at me 
through that lamentable mask. 




A LAST LOOK 

March 18. 

Spring is in the air and a call of flowers sings 
in our thoughts. We put our heads to- 
gether and write to Paris for seed catalogues. 
In imagination we have already sown every 
available space of our field with bulbs and 
seeds, and the crude green paint of our 
shacks has disappeared under running nas- 
turtiums varying from palest yellow to 
crimson. It is also the season of sun-baths 
which has come on us at a leap. The men 
are delighted to be carried out of their wards 

238 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 239 

on to the grass where they can spend long, 
healing days. The great optimist, our 
fertile earth, is busy making good our 
waste. 

March 20. 

A wire calls me home. Through a maze 
of conflicting emotions I look back along 
the days. Civilian life seems as far from 
me as a skin long ago sloughed off. After 
my breezy corner of a green shack, in this 
tiny world of keen Hving, how self-centred, 
and cluttered with artificial values that 
other life will seem. 

Yet here as there, devotion and egotism, 
love and strife, incessantly weave their 
intricate pattern into a dun background 
against which all real heroism finds high 
reUef. 

The toll of our 140 beds is the grimmest 
reality of war and measures the enormity of 
its sacrifice. The simple rite of dying for a 
thought, and stark human endurance — 
played over by gaiety of heart — are the 
standards their occupants set us. For 



240 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

those they leave behind them, these men 
once more wipe the political slate clean 
with their blood — innocent blood that 
through the ages appears, however illogi- 
cally, to be the only effacing medium. 
The mutilated bodies and lives of innumer- 
able scapegoats are the highway along which 
we still irresponsibly chalk up a score that 
in its turn must be wiped out. 

If the denial of life for a dream of free- 
dom is the face of their currency to-day, 
how shall we — our ears tuned to the over- 
tone of their endeavour — see to it that to- 
morrow, bought at such a price, bear on its 
face something more than a promise of three 
meals a day with a zest — ^for ourselves? 

March 22. 

This is my last day at the hospital. It is 
a quivering morning of misty golden sun- 
shine. I think regretfully of the coming 
leavetakings — of the soldiers and of these 
people who have so soon become part of my 
life. As a send-off the Directress kindly 
suggests that Night Hawk and I take a 



A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 241 

drive. Monsieur le Gestionnaire is all 
pleasant acquiescence. 

"Where would you like to go?" 
"Would Poperinghe be possible?" 
"You may be stopped — still you can but 
come back." And he makes out a pass. 

No one accosts us. We drive through the 
British lines, meeting British guns, British 
troops, all along the road. The town seems 
half asleep. Straggling through it are 
soldiers — strolling, talking, smoking. I am 
disappointed to find it so little interesting 
— only more or less scarred, more or less 
wounded, like all other bombarded towns. 
There is a crushing sameness in destruction; 
the degree only differs. Most window 
spaces are boarded up, others are pasted 
over with Union Jack stars of paper to hold 
them firm through future shocks. Two 
lines of Tommies are being drilled in front 
of the blank windows of the hospital. The 
church is locked; we cannot see it. The 
square and market place look deserted. 
Night Hawk asks some young Durhams for 
news of a Canadian regiment. All venture 



242 A GREEN TENT IN FLANDERS 

suggestions but no one knows anything. 
We are all so happy under the pulsating 
sunshine that we feel like giving forth little 
green shoots. To be alive and know it 
seems, for the moment, enough. Yet my 
train must be caught and we have only just 
time to get home. 

We crank the motor up and, as we leave 
the square and turn for a last wave of the 
hand, we see them still standing there, wait- 
ing — so rosy and so young. 





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